After appearing at trade shows for a couple years, Asus' Eee keyboard, which has the guts of an entire PC inside, is available for pre-order.
Amazon lists the Eee Keyboard for $599, and MiniPCPro, which posted a detailed video walkthrough of the product, says it'll ship on April 23.
The Eee Keyboard is a neat concept: It's basically a netbook stuffed inside a sleek-looking aluminum keyboard, but with a couple unique features that set it apart from an all-in-one PC. First, it has a 5-inch capacitive touch screen for quick navigation. It also includes an Ultra Wideband transmitter and receiver for wirelessly sending audio and video to a monitor or television.
For specs, there's an Intel Atom N270 processor, 1 GB of DDR2 RAM and a 16 GB solid state drive. A Broadcom HD encoder helps the netbook guts run high definition video, and there's actually a software application from ArcSoft that pops open when you play an HD video stream, even from websites such as YouTube.
The keyboard runs Windows XP Home, but there's a little user interface on the touch screen for controlling video and quickly launching applications. The touch screen also functions as a mouse trackpad, and supports multi-touch gestures for navigation, such as moving forward or backwards in a Web browser.
I love the concept of the Eee Keyboard, though I have trouble envisioning it as a replacement for any of my existing computers. That makes the $599 hard to justify. I'd much rather see the keyboards best features -- a touch screen navigator and wireless transmission to monitors -- wind up in other products. Still, kudos to Asus for making this thing a reality.
