OK, so I’ve been in moderate salivation mode over this for a while.
And I’d actually planned on buying one around the first of June, but… The only real selling point is the multi-touch tablet conversion feature, and while that’s certainly a “Gee-whiz” that puts this out of the range of being seriously touchable by such as the iPhad piece of crap, I know it’d just be a toy for sitting in the entertainment room goofing off while my Wonder Woman worked on her lastest class for her (latest) masters program or watched one of her fav TV shows. Not enough. Heck, I didn’t really get my money’s worth out of the CrosspadXP I bought for taking notes (although the pen is super nice :-)), and that’s the biggie feature on the touchpad for me: handwriting recognition.
So, since I’d add an external DVDRW drive and up the memory from the 1GB it comes with to 2GB, that drives the price all the way up to $585… $85 more than this, another ASUS computer that really fits my style better, though it lacks the “gee-whiz” factor of converting to a tablet. But. At $85 less, it has a 15.6″ screen, a DVDRW drive and 4GB RAM. OK, so it lacks the SSD drive of the T91, as well, having just a regular old 250GB–Oops! 320GB–notebook drive–slower and more energy-hungry. So? It’s not as though I’d use the thing for anything really demanding. It’d just be a “second” (well, a larger number, but use and feature-wise “second”) computer for use maybe away from twc central, but certainly for light use in other rooms of twc central where I might not want to boot a desktop (though there might well be one present :-)). And it does have that one feature I really appreciate in a notebook: a numerical keypad.
Sure, like just about any notebook I’d buy (notebook=NOT main box for me; for one thing, a notebook with a 23″ or larger screen would be silly :-)), it’s rather under-powered by desktop standards, but it’s got more horses under the hood than a netbook (or the ridiculous iPhad) and… would be fine for watching the occasional movie or tv show, surfing and handling email and, numerical keypad (am I repeating my single fav feature? *heh*)… and I’m well used to reading eBooks on a horizontally-displayed screen, although I’m not all that fond of the Kindle for PC app.
Sooo… still debating, but this lil plow horse looks pretty good for my use. Not “needs” of course, because I can do without it, but it’d certainly be handy.
In other, unrelated, compgeeky news, Opera Win is now at Version 10.54, Build 3390–out since Wednesday (and a nice, though slight, improvement over Tuesday’s buiild, IMO). Sadly, I cannot yet recommend the ‘nix 10.54 betas, as they have all seemed a bit more buggy than the Windows betas. (Almost any bugginess would be “more” than I’ve experienced in the Windows 10.54 betas, though.) Stay tuned for moves to 10.54 in the ‘nix builds…