CES 2009 - ASUS Expands the Eee Family
by Jarred Walton on January 7, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
The final addition to the Eee Family shown at the event is the Eee Keyboard.
The Eee Keyboard looks like a full sized keyboard (reminiscent of Apple’s aluminum keyboard) but with two major differences: an integrated PC and an integrated 5” touchscreen display. I wrote about such a device in one of my blogs at WePC.com, take the numeric keypad away from a standard keyboard and replace it with a touchscreen/touchpad and that’s what you get with the Eee Keyboard.
The integrated PC (no word on specs, presumably very Eee-like?) allows the keyboard itself to be all you need for a computer, assuming you have a display nearby. The display part of the equation is pretty sexy, the Eee Keyboard has an integrated Ultra Wideband HDMI transmitter - if you’ve got a display with a UWB HDMI receiver, all you’ll need is this keyboard and you’re good to go, no cables required. There’s a standard HDMI port on the keyboard as well. As soon as you say wireless, however, battery life becomes something to discuss, and at present we have no idea what sort of battery life that Eee Keyboard will offer. We're unsure about whether or not an optical drive is part of the keyboard, but it does present some intriguing ideas.
The touch screen can function as either a screen for the integrated PC or as a trackpad for whatever machine you have the Eee Keyboard hooked up to. A large, glass trackpad on a keyboard seems like the ideal way to bring multi-touch to the desktop.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
19 Comments
View All Comments
yyrkoon - Wednesday, January 7, 2009 - link
Heya Jarred,Their forum pages still load atrociously slow. They're also very unorganized, meaning instead of having several categories under motherboards such as how ABIT's site used to be laid out, you have to wade through tons of garbage to find what you're looking for. Yes, we all know of the search function (at least it should have one ), but sometimes people like to read about varying products so they know what to expect.
You're not Asus, I understand that, but maybe you could mention it to someone who could remedy that. I am personally not very big on Asus products, but fixing this one issue for me could change my mind a good deal since I am a small business systems integrator who likes to keep on top of known issues.
KeypoX - Wednesday, January 7, 2009 - link
And more importantly Andriod!!! I hope it can do some damage, because win 7 is not that great... not much of a upgrade to vista.Netbooks are looking more and more attractive.
KeypoX - Wednesday, January 7, 2009 - link
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=13867">http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=138677Enigma - Wednesday, January 7, 2009 - link
Love the new products, but I'm worried the article for builder's is going to get pushed because of CES.Mr. Fink, you're not at CES are you? :)
Icewind31 - Wednesday, January 7, 2009 - link
however I'm sorta still hyped up about that EEE Box w/ the HD3400 graphics... they made the announcement.. but since then... no release date or anything! Have definitely been waiting for them to release it.Spivonious - Wednesday, January 7, 2009 - link
It reminds me of the old Apple IIC; just connect a display and you're good to go.I'm curious how much the wireless HDMI recievers cost. It would be neat if they were built into TVs, so I could just pull the keyboard out from under the coffee table and start using the computer.
acejj26 - Wednesday, January 7, 2009 - link
The saying goes, "You innovate your way out of a recession," and this is exactly what Asus is doing. The new products look amazing.R3MF - Wednesday, January 7, 2009 - link
that is what i want to see.Roland00 - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link
You are going to have to wait, for several reasons1) Ion was just announced a few weeks ago and is still in the prototype stage, thus any possible laptop would still be in the idea stage and unless Asus or similar brands were working extremely closely with nvidia they probably don't even have the blueprints for the motherboards.
2) The dual core atoms have double to triple (depending on which atotm to atom you are comparing it to) the watts required to run the laptop thus draining battery faster. Thus you may have to wait for the new 32nm atoms.
3) Finally it is in the netbook companies best interest to release a netbook with a windows os (due to more marketshare, for better or worse people are less likely to buy a netbook with a non windows os). Microsoft in its rules for XP on netbooks says no dualcore atoms or more ram than 1 gig. Thus unless a company puts windows vista basic on the nettop you are probably waiting for windows 7.
Thus we probably won't see atom/ion notebooks until at least q3 09 and maybe not until q4 09/q1 10
here are microsoft's rules in short on what a netbook has to have to have xp home on it.
http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_conte...">http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?optio...p;task=v...