It’s the Asus Eee Keyboard, a sorta PC-keyboard hybrid that pretty much blew my mind.
It’s got an Intel Atom processor, 1GB of memory, and either 16GB or 32GB or storage space, and a five-inch touch screen on the right-hand side.
The idea, nearest I can tell (this is the first I’ve ever heard of the thing), is to squeeze a netbook into a keyboard. You can connect it to an external monitor and control it like it was any old Windows netbook.
I have no idea what’s going on anymore, but this is neat. $600 neat? That’s for you to decide.
It’s been a long time since we first met, Eee Keyboard. You’ve changed a lot. Well, not that much. But you’re not quite as compelling as you were in early 2009. HTPCs are being integrated with our HDTVs now, and our smartphones and tablets are becoming universal remotes for them. I’m afraid there’s not a lot of room for a doodad like yourself… but I’m reporting you for old time’s sake. What, you’re $600 now?!
Yes, the long-awaited Eee Keyboard is available for pre-order, as we knew it would be, over at Amazon. I’m afraid Asus might have missed the boat on this one, though. I mean, between this thing and an iPad, what is the average consumer going to pick? Yeah, that’s what I thought too.
It seems a little odd that we first saw the Eee Keyboard at CES 2009 and it’s still not available. The demo that we played with at least seemed like it was nearly production ready. But here we are over a year later and now the Asus chairman is stating that the new release date is April 2010. Like we haven’t heard that one before.
At this point Asus better produce a flawless product. It’s unbelievable that there isn’t more generic clones available. One was spotted at CES 2010 made by the Chinese company Great Wall, but it’s a China-only model. Hopefully we’ll see the Eee Keyboard sometime this year. You might as well start saving your pennies though, it’s not going to be cheap.
Bad news for Asus, the EEE Keyboard that still hasn’t been released yet was beaten to market by a clone. The knockoff version is made by the Chinese company Great Wall, and while the clone version did beat the original to market, there are some serious reasons to wait until Asus releases their version.
The Great Wall version sounds good on paper, 2gb of RAM, a 250gb hard drive, wifi, and a Nvidia chipset and a new Cross PC U510 CPU. It all starts to fall apart when you look at how exactly it works. It’s lacking the built in battery, it doesn’t support dual displays, and will in fact turn off the touchscreen when you plug a monitor into the machine. The Great Wall version will sell for around $570 US in China, but I doubt we’ll ever see it in the US.
Additionally, when you start to compare features (like the touchscreen working when you plug a monitor in), it really seems to me that it’ll be better to wait for Asus to come out with their version.
I amaze myself sometimes. You see, I have so much power as a writer on this invincible and influential blog that sometimes I can change an entire industry with but a word. Case in point: apparently my recent post on Eee’s decision to change the touchscreen to resistive on their Eee Keyboard was so crushing that they’ve altered their entire business plan and delayed the device to accommodate it. O Mighty Blogger! Thou humblest the world!
Actually, I’m guessing they did some focus groups and found that the trade-off of “lower price and crappier touchscreen” with “people actually wanting the device” was unacceptable. At any rate, the device (which had an original internal release window of August-ish) may not make it in time for the holidays. It’s not rare that we see a device at CES that doesn’t make it during the next year, but I really had hopes for this thing.
Remember when everything had a capacitive touchscreen, and we decided we really hated those and we wanted resistive ones that required styluses? Me neither. That’s why I’m a little puzzled as to why the Eee Keyboard, which had a perfectly workable capacitive touchscreen when I gave it its first hands-on in January, has been changed to have a resistive screen and integrated stylus. It’s like they produced a concept car, and then when they put it into production, they gave it wooden wheels.
Watch the full video demo above, and see the madness that is the new design decision. Controlling a cursor on screen by using a stylus on a differently-shaped touchscreen… seems a bit of a terrible idea to me.
Bad news for Asus, the EEE Keyboard that still hasn’t been released yet was beaten to market by a clone. The knockoff version is made by the Chinese company Great Wall, and while the clone version did beat the original to market, there are some serious reasons to wait until Asus releases their version.