Saw the Asus T91 in Spain about three months ago and became enthralled with the concept of a tablet netbook... I almost bought the T91 from [...] a month ago but I did my research.
I liked the small factor form of the 8.9" T91, but was worried about reviews that it was very slow due to the less capable Atom Z CPU it ships with. Therefore I pleaded with my wife to let me splurge US$200 more for the bigger, faster and I think better Gigabyte T1028.
Was it worth begging my wife for the extra US$200, I believe so!!!
As a netbook the T1028 is very expensive, priced on par with low end Core Duo laptops, and I am sure that tomorrow (i.e. Black Friday) a lucky few will even be able to buy a very decent and capable full fledge laptop with the US$615 it cost me from Amazon.com. But I needed a small form and light portable computer capable of doing the basic computer needs that I could take with me on business trips, like check webmail, chat, surf the internet, watch clips, etc.
Based on these requirements alone, the T1028 performs very well (I own a Sony FW373 laptop with 4GB of RAM and a Core 2 Duo P8600, and truthfully right now the T1028 loads up faster and even though the Sony is faster doing those everyday functions, I cannot see a huge amount of difference between the response time between the two). Compared to netbooks, I borrowed from my brother an Acer One with the same Atom CPU and RAM, but for some reason the T1028 runs much faster.
As a tablet the T1028 is just what I needed, lighter than the HP tablets, and about US$200 cheaper also. More capable than the so call "Ultra Mobile Personal Computers" or UMPCs from Samsung, Sony, Motion Computing, etc. and very well about half what those UMPCs cost, even used ones. Head 2 head with HP, Samsung, Sony and Motion Computing I would definitely bet on the T1028, maybe the only real competition would be the T91 due to price, but from what I read the slowness of the T91 hampers its chances.
The T1028 does not come with any Tablet OS, so I had to download some freeware and widgets to get the advertised functionality of the Asus T91's in house software... found one very usefull that lets me draw on top of the page and save the image, similar to how the sportcasters explain football plays during live broadcasts (technically speaking is called Inking).
To get on the good side of my spouse I downloaded Picasa from Google, transfered our photos from our trips and created a photo screensaver, turned the screen away from the keyboard but did not fully closed it back as a 100% tablet and we now have a 10.1" digital picture frame... I even went as far as to tell my wife that between business trips I will leave the T1028 configured like that in our kitchen as a full time digital picture frame and kitchen PC. I've now downloaded another software that displays a very nice looking flip clock and it will also serve as a kitchen clock for my wife. Finally with the inking program I downloaded for free she can leave me messages on the desktop wallpaper as quick reminders or message board.
I am very pleased with the T1028, my only cons would be the keyboard, it is not that its small, but that the manufacturer decided to shrink the ",", "." and "/" buttons, so I find it very easy to hit the "/" trying to press "." Even now that I am aware of this shortcoming I still hit the "/", this is very bothersome specially if you are entering email and web addresses, or if you want to write a grammatically correct sentence.
With my wife happy now, I am thinking of buying an Avermedia Expresscard 34 TV/FM tuner, but with that I would fully convert the extra computer I needed occasionally for business trips into a full fledge and capable kitchen computer center with TV/FM tunning, an inking message board for quick messages to the rest of my family, a kitchen clock and a digital picture frame, AND my wife can now chat, email her sister, call me thru skype while on business trips, listen to her mp3 without bothering me or asking me for my laptop...