The Asus Eee Keyboard is Expensive

I was looking for a nice, cheap nettop to replace my five-year old desktop. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but it really is dated and sluggish. And since I use my laptop as my primary computer, the nettop would actually just serve as a secondary computer for my family members who just surf the net, do projects on the word processor, play games on Facebook and the occasional Popcap game, and require nothing else from their computers.

I was actually looking at the Eee Keyboard as a possible nettop. It’s small, it has specs that aren’t really cutting edge, but are good enough for Windows XP or Windows 7 Home Basic. As for the 16 to 32GB storage space, I was thinking of installing a networked hard drive anyway, so it’s not much of a problem (that means I’ll be stuck with Windows XP Professional though). Anyway, I did hear it was going to be out this February, so I was eagerly waiting for it. As far as I can remember, the original price for the Eee keyboard was going to be sub-$300, so it’s not going to be much of a big deal. Also, have I mentioned how much I love Asus products? (Clue: this blog’s URL gives the answer away.)

And then the news comes out: it’s going to cost somewhere between $500 and $600. What the heck, Asus? This is a bit too pricey for a nettop running yesterday’s specs. You guys are even making dual-core nettops that aren’t even near that price range.

For the curious, the Eee Keyboard has a previous generation Intel Atom N270 (1.6 GHz) processor, a single DIMM slot, 1GB of DDR2 memory with no accessible way to upgrade to 2 GB. Storage options are a 16GB and 32GB SSD. There’s the touch screen, but it’s definitely not worth $500, Asus.

Did Asus bite off more than they can chew on this one that they had to actually double the price before launch? You tell me.