As you can see from the pictures, its dimensions aren’t that different from an ordinary keyboard, where the numerical part has been replaced by a touchscreen. The keyboard also has backlight, which is another plus and the best proof of a carefully designed device. Production quality and appearance have been improved compared to the prototypes, while the combination of ground aluminium and black background looks nice indeed. We were also pleasantly surprised by the quality of the installed speakers. Although not thunderously loud, they do produce a very clear and precise sound, taking on even some of the 5.1 speaker sets previously seen in exclusive notebook models. Smaller dimensions meant lower weight, its 1.1 kg making it one of the lightest on the market. The number of available connectors hasn’t decreased a single bit, which is yet another virtue of this netbook.

As far as the hardware specs go, it’s very close to first-gen netbooks. The basis of this device comprises an Atom N270 CPU with the 945 chipset, 1 GB RAM and, surprisingly, an SSD device, unfortunately, with a capacity of 32 GB. Cheaper variants exist, some with 16 GB SSDs, without HDMI or wireless image transfer, but the one we tested was the strongest and most expensive one. Regardless of all its advantages, moderately priced SSDs are still stuck with low capacities, and ASUS choosing to preinstall Windows XP on these devices was probably conditioned by their desire to save as much disk space as possible. In order to fulfil the promise about 720p video playback, ASUS’ engineers installed a Broadcom Crystal HD video accelerator, and we recommend warmly that you replace the ancient driver version with a fresh one from the website immediately. Bundled with EeeKeyboard are a tiny power converter and a Wi-Fi antenna, used both the normal way and to connect to the Ultra Wide Bandwidth receiver. This receiver is contained within the box, together with its own power converter and an HDMI cable, using the HDMI connection to transfer signal to the HDTV itself. It should be noted that 720p video resolution transfer is a very demanding task, which means that direct visibility should be provided between the receiver and EeeKeyboard, but also make sure that the distance doesn’t go over the specified maximum of five metres with direct optical visibility. Our experience shows that even three metres can turn out problematic. We didn’t particularly like the receiver because it requires its own power supply and has active cooling of its own (a fan inside the case). Although the wireless interconnection system didn’t particularly impress us with its conception and limitations, it has a single advantage over any other we’ve ever tested - command response is almost immediate. All commendations are due for this, since we’ve seen wireless mice with a worse response time, let alone video transfer devices, which is a much more demanding task. If 720p isn’t being transferred at a certain moment, you may freely increase the distance, which can be good for chatting, surfing the net, doing things on Facebook or checking e-mail. Unfortunately, there have been occasional connection losses, with no particular cause, which we tend to attribute to the sample we received for testing, but was nevertheless incredibly stressful.

We were pleasantly astonished by the system booting speed and going to/coming out of hibernation, which is primarily owing to the installed SSD device and a well-optimized system. The display located on the keyboard should be regarded as an auxiliary one, since you can’t really use Windows XP properly on it, despite decent diagonal and resolution. In the event that EeeKeyboard isn’t connected to a TV, this screen becomes the primary one, but with a well-organised menu that suits the screen resolution nicely, containing the most often used and needed applications, such as media player, Gmail and Hotmail clients, a few games, blind typing tutorial software, Chinese language helper etc. When you start the browser (Internet Explorer), you meet the first drawbacks of the installed operating system. Windows XP was never intended and adjusted for use with touchscreen displays, which means that all those things that you’re used to doing on your mobile smartphone are gone here. No easy scrolling, no page listing, no zooming... Things become different when an HDTV display is connected as the primary one, since the auxiliary display becomes a replacement touchpad. This combination works surprisingly well, and the feeling while using it is pleasant. Multitouch detection is good, which means that zooming, listing and similar operations function flawlessly. The integrated display can serve other purposes besides being a touchpad; upon starting Media Player, it will display the most used commands such as pause, previous/next, new playlist, volume control etc. All of this was done very elegantly, and ASUS engineers must be commended for the very neat work they did.

HD video playback actually works, which is not the case with similar configurations. Using the included and very usable Arcsoft Total Media Theatre, 720p playback was fluent even in MKV format, although CPU usage was rather high, around 60%, which caused notable heat levels. The inability to change the orientation of the integrated display makes it incredibly difficult to watch video on it, which leaves HDTV as the only solution. We were pleased to see that acceleration was also active in Media Player Classic HomeCinema and KMPlayer, although the CPU usage was a bit higher in these applications, around 70%. We also liked an additional image setting application, used for instances where the TV image may be shrunk below or stretched above normal.