Asus Eee Keyboard Thingy Actually Kind of Cool, Has Decent Specs

A quick glance at Asus’ Eee prototype keyboard would lead a person to mistake it for a normal wireless keyboard with an LCD media panel—you know, like the play, pause, and quick launch buttons on your laptop. When I first saw pictures of the Eee keyboard, I immediately thought of the Colecovision of my early childhood. What is this thing? Some kind of Gameboy-Palm Pilot-MP3 player? It must be something high tech and useful if it’s at CES, right?

Right. But what’s so useful about a keyboard? We’ve had those for years.

In reality, the Asus Eee Keyboard is a kind of 21^st century Colecovision. It sports the innards of a media-oriented netbook and interfaces with HD TVs and monitors. Basically, the Eee PC turns any TV into a giant monitor and saves you from the hassle of lugging around a separate keyboard, computer, and peripherals. While an HDMI port seems like overkill on a “netbook,” it means that you can do word processing, browse the web, and enjoy multimedia on giant 52-inch HD TV screens.

I’m game. We’ll have to wait awhile before this thing hits the market though. The Asus Eee keyboard-amajig isn’t slated to be available until sometime in early to mid 2009. But judging by the specs The Boy Genius Report dropped, she’ll be worth waiting for:

• 5-inch touch screen LCD


• 1.6 GHz Atom Processor


• 1GB RAM


• 16+GB solid state hard drive


• WiFi, Bluetooth


• HDMI, 2 USB, VGA


• Windows XP Home

This thing will be pretty cool, but honestly, I’m more excited to play giant HD Space Invaders and Pitfall with the Eee Keyboard. I can’t help it; it just looks way too much like a Comodore 64 or something.

As you can see, spec wise, the Asus Eee Keyboard is pretty similar to standard releases of the Eee. No word on price yet, but we can’t imagine it going far north of $500. Check out our netbook reviews for an idea of the Eee’s performance.

Be sure to check out our CES 2009 coverage while you’re at it. While CES had fewer robots and OLEDs than we would’ve liked, there was some stunning gadgetry to behold. Start with these handpicked posts:

Getting a Look at Allio, The First High Def LCD TV PC

Palm Pre Hands on (Almost)

Alioscopy at CES: Is 3D in Our Future?

Sharp Not Impressive at CES