It’s been over a year since Asus first introduced its Eee Keyboard concept which packs a full fledged computer into a keyboard with a battery, a touchscreen display/controller, and wireless HDMI output to connect to your TV or monitor. Asus has yet to actually bring the Eee Keyboard to market. But a year is plenty of time for cheap Chinese knockoffs to start popping up. So it’s hardly surprising that the Great Wall Cross PC U510 looks so darn familiar.
The U510 featurs the same PC-in-a-keyboard style deign as the Eee PC, complete with a touchscreen display on the right side of the keyboard. One area where it actually surpasses the Eee Keyboard is in the graphics department. While Asus plans to use a media coprocessor of some sort to enable HD video output on a device with a low power Atom processor and integrated graphics, the U510 features NVIDIA ION graphics which means the keyboard PC should be able to handle not just 1080p HD video, but also some 3D video gaming tasks.
The PC has a 1.6GHz Atom N270 CPU, 2G of RAM, and a 250GB hard drive, which also provides significantly more storage space than the 16GB SSD Asus plans to include in the Eee Keyboard.
On the down side, the U510 has no battery, which means it’ll need to remain plugged in during operation. And say goodbye to that wireless connection to an external display. The U510 requires a physical connection to your monitor or TV.
The keyboard PC will sell for about $570 in China.
via Cloned in China
So how many __mobile__ couch potates are there in the world?
Having to plug into your TV (which isn’t mobile) and
having to plug into power at the couch (which isn’t mobile)
does not sound too restrictive.
Would be nice if they did something about that price.
The ‘pc in a keyboard’ isn’t exactly new. I had some thing similar with my TI-99/4A. One could connect it to either a tv or a monitor. Where the little screen is on the one above, the TI-99/4A had a cartridge slot where one loaded programs. I still have it but it no longer works.
$570 seems like a high price to pay for it. I wonder if Asus will have a lower price? If they do, they will beat the ‘nock off’ in price and features?
while the price is soso, i would not mind getting one, if only to remind me of my A500 days 😉