"Women, in particular, were more likely to opt for a smaller screened, more mobile device, he claimed"

Presumably because it can fit in their handbags..?

Mines the one without the handbag on the hook.

Everything old is new again. Remember Dragon, Sinclair, C-64?!!!

is now a girly laptop? bah.

Also, would the new screens make it an OLeeeD PC?

Keyboard computing: It's the future... if you're from the same era as Marty McFly.

"which incorporates a fully fledged PC and touchpad into a standard five-inch deep keyboard"

A standard five-inch deep keyboard? In what reality is a keyboard five inches deep (depth being measured vertically)?

"The spiritual successor to the Atari ST is born."

*cough* You mean the spiritual successor to the BBC Micro, don't you? What with them having come out a good four years before the Atari ST? Even the Acorn Atom came out in 1980/81, and the Acorn Electron in 1983.

Cheaper than a Mac, there again, so would a block of gold....

"Shih rejected a suggestion that the Eee brand was becoming diluted as the firm slapped its the three letters on everything..."

Wait. Is "Eee" 3 letters, or only one...or two.

I'll just go now.

Ah the rich kid BBC owners are out here again! Of course, the Apple ][ predates even the Atom by a good 4 years...

Heavenly Bill because he at least does some good with all his money, unlike Jobs.

It's still possible to get a PC in a keyboard. A company by the name of Cybernet Manufacturing still sells them with modern processors, and I've seen older examples turn up on auction sites.

Hopefully nobody at Register Hardware will mind too much if I post a link:

http://greyghost.mooo.com/cybernet-zpc/

(dial up, low bandwidth and users who are charged by data transfer amounts may want to proceed with caution--I took a fair number of pictures in my exploration.

that used to mean something else in the good old days of the eee launch and a few months after...

<sigh>

"(depth being measured vertically)"

And I suppose in your world height is measured horizontally????? I'll translate then: it'll be incredibly tall and slim.

In our world, depth is front-to-back distance when referring to objects (top-to-bottom when talking about space, such as the space in a swimming pool)

I'm still waiting on the EEE monitor we were promised. I don't want a big, clunky, lap-roasting keyboard.

Still nice to hear they may be pushing OLED, since the more backers it gets, the sooner it'll affordable (and hopefully > 10 inches).

So what they're actually building is an Eee, but without a screen?

Yes, that needs a screeen instead

(ducks quickly and grabs for jacket)

Long before there was the Atari, there were the Apple IIE and the TRS-80 Model 1 Level 2 which were both keyboards with electronics inside them !! The Tandy had the better keyboard but the Apple had the better marketing and the rest, as they say, is history !!

... What is its practical use ?

It's a shame there's no picture as that would make things clearer for people, but if it hasn't changed since prototype it looks like a standard keyboard with a 5" LCD where the numeric keypad usually is.

It looks nice, feels like a "must have", but it's darned expensive and I'm not sure what use it is.

Slightly unusual to celebrate the 32nd anniversary of a product, but it is true for the TRS80 model 1 which was launched in 1977! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80). It didn't need a mouse or touchpad or indeed Windows and managed to do wordprocessing in 48kb of RAM!

Mine's the Parka...

Neil.