ASUS T91 & T101, the right boat tablet?
Hot damn. The nine and ten inch screens on these new ASUS Eee PC T91 and T101 “netbooks” swivel to tablet mode and are not just touch but multi touch. The small one weighs just over two pounds, and can have a GPS built in. Now I’m quite aware that my interest in the big HP TouchSmart series isn’t shared by many boaters, but, geez, couldn’t one of these little puppies make a nifty nav/comms accessory? Engadget and particularly LaptopMag have good T91/T101 coverage. Pricing isn’t noted but the existing ASUS Eee series
Seems I’m always on the leading edge of obsolescence! I recently put a page on my website called the ‘Cruiser’s Computer’ based on the EeePC 1000H. If these tablet versions also run on 12VDC then they should be worth a look see. Terry
http://yachtvalhalla.net/projects/cruisercomputer/cruisercomputer.htm
Like the concept but big turnoff for me is the glossy display which is a definite no-no in my pilot house. When recently upgrading my onboard computer I went out of my way to locate an “older” white model iMac that still had the best & brightest non-glare LCD on the market.
I recently gave up on waiting for a convertible tablet mini notebook – the Gigabyte product that was out earlier never materialized near me. So I bought a used tablet made by Motion computing – not state of the art, but it runs basic nav software and plays most media, and is a great ereader.
But if this version is cheaper and lighter and can last 5h on a battery charge – Im there.
I bought an EeePC 904HA and am thrilled with it. Six plus hours on the battery, and 160GB on the hard drive, less than $340 from B&H. If you fellow Pnabots haven’t been to B&H lately, and you’re going to New York, I URGE you to go: Its a major techie and cultural experience, the absolute leading edge in retail technology. They should offer a prize to anyone who can ask for a new product they don’t have.
Ben: you should not go. I say that as a friend. You have to think about “Big Gizmo”, remember?
That LaptopMag link revealed that the T101 keyboard (but not the T91 as shown above) has been changed to fix the location of the shift key on the right hand side. The previous location (as on the machine I’m using to type this .. the 1000H) is cumbersome for a trained typist. Here’s the new layout:
http://yachtvalhalla.net/photos/eeet101keyboard.jpg
Vista is the worst operating system ever!
Sail with a mac on board.
Ask any Vista user and you will hear complaints.
Ask any Mac user and they will tell you how much they LOV their mac.
Sorry Michael … the ASUS netbooks run Windows XP, not Vista. Terry
Right, though these new ones may run Windows 7. Besides, I’ve been using Vista as my main OS for six months without big issues.
Terry, Thanks for the detail on the keyboards. In fact, your whole Eee page is really interesting. And never mind “the leading edge of obsolescence.” At 72, you are one geeky sailor, and an inspiration to us all.
So you run a 7 year old os because the current Windows OS is so bad?
Michael, great photos! But this isn’t really the place to vent about an OS. There isn’t that much difference between them anymore. You are welcome to have a personal preference, but if you say one of them is bad you should come up with some real reasons. For non-fanatics, the rule has always been “pick the software, then pick the system that runs it”. The other side of that rule is that the systems which are popular get the most software, for better or worse.
My preference for XP over Vista is starting to wane also.
Still … I do everything I can to avoid Vista, and hope to skip right to Windows 7 since I have gotten by this long without Vista.
If you’re considering XP vs Vista vs MacOS X, you should read this article:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10140575-17.html
MS’s big success has been marketing. They stumbled with that on Vista. MS’s big failure has been security. Mac rules there, XP is weak; Vista is better than XP, but the users didn’t grok how to make that work for them; they just saw it as getting in their way. Also, if you use Vista you need to be careful to get Vista drivers. Vista isn’t nearly as bad as its reputation. I use XP, Vista, MacOS X, and Unix (including Linux). The OS choice should be up to the individual user. The software vendors should be writing their code so that it can run on any platform; the web has given us a good example.
Not to belabour the XP vs Vista discussion but I have recently been a bit chagrined to find that my objections to using Vista with some navigation programs (such as MaxSea 10.3.2.1) was that it was not possible to view the position of the vessel on the chart even though the GPS data was being received by the program. I, and others, assumed that the navigation program needed a Vista patch, something that has not been published for the MaxSea version I have. I now discover, thanks to a savvy yachtie down under, that the problem has been the need for a Vista driver for the GPS, either for the ones that feed via the USB port directly, such as the ‘hocky puck’ variety, or those feeding via a USB-RS232 adapter. Interestingly, one yachtie reports that his ancient Radio Shack USB-RS232 adapter works fine with Vista. So far, I’ve found drivers for two USB GPS and for the Prolific USB-RS232 adapter.
For more information see the discussion “MaxSea and Vista” at http://yachtvalhalla.net/downloads/download.htm