The chaps over at Bit-Tech take an early look at the Eee PC T91 tablet PC, the first major departure from the traditional and comprehensive range of Asus Eee PC netbooks. The first and most important feature on this Eee PC is its touch-sensitive display (with the typical 1,024 x 600 native resolution) which is attached to the rest of the machine via a 180-degree hinge. This hinge also rotates by 180 degrees and enables the T91 to transform itself from a traditional netbook into what Asus claims is the smallest and slimmest tablet PC to date when the display is folded back over the keyboard. Here's a taster:

Disappointingly, being a first-generation Eee Tablet PC, there's no multi-touch functionality but this is a technology the company expects to introduce further down the line - there were multi-touch enabled products running Microsoft Surface demos shown during the Asus keynote at CES, but your guess is as good as ours when it comes to expected availability dates for them. We mention this because one concern there has always been for tablet PCs is the software that runs on them. In some respects, the tablet PC is a technology with a limited usage model and software has always been a weak point because the operating systems typically deployed aren't designed with touch in mind. Asus has chosen Windows XP on its Eee PC T91, which isn't really optimised all that well for tablet use - we've got to wait until Windows 7 until we get optimised support for touch from a Microsoft operating system out of the box.

The keyboard is one area of the device that Asus says is subject to change before the launch. It currently features a standard keyboard very similar to the Eee PC 901, but it will later be replaced with a chiclet-style keyboard similar to the one on the Eee PC 1000HE, some of Sony's notebooks (like the TZ) or Apple's new range of MacBooks. Just below the keyboard, there's an adequately sized touch pad, which isn't as good as the touch pads on other Eee PCs, but it's by no means unusable. Occasionally, we found that our movements weren't registering properly and the buttons below required quite a firm press to register. However, considering this is a pre-production sample, the problems we encountered here could likely be early build quality issues that will be fixed in the couple of months between now and release.