Eee Keyboard PC: Lower price?
Posted in Uncategorized on September 14th, 2009 by gkrakow
As first previewed here a few weeks ago, the upcoming Asus Keyboard PC – that means a PC built inside a full-sized keyboard including a 5-inch (diagonal) color screen) – will be released here in the United States within the next few weeks.
We had a sneak peek of the interesting new device weeks ago – way before Asus let journalists take a look at Europe’s Computex show. Both hardware and software were very, very early betas but the computer we tried seemed to work quite well for us.
The version we played with had an Intel Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of solid-state storage and it ran on Windows XP. But, the final timing of the Keyboard PC’s release seems to coincide quite nicely with Microsoft’s Windows 7 due date.
That means expect the new Keyboard PC to be running on Mircosoft’s new and (greatly) improved operating system. And then again, maybe a nice Linux version of Asus’ Keyboard PC is in our future somewhere down the line.
Other interesting Keyboard PC features include back-up battery power (for when you’re not plugged-into an AC outlet), the latest/greatest/fastest Wi-fi connectivity (802.11 b/g/n) and a wireless HDMI ultra-wide band audio/video connection.
Overall, we think the Asus engineers had living room use in mind when this device was originally conceived. We can think of other places to use it as well.
Price is now rumored to be in the $400-$500 range. We originally guessed $549 (don’t forget it is a full computer, mouse, keyboard and monitor – although a small screened monitor- in one nice, neat package.
We’ll find out soon enough.