Our glimpse into the future of gadgets foretold of a monitor in a keyboard, a desk that ‘reads’ whatever’s placed on it (including the temperature of your coffee!), and the iPhone getting a long overdue app addition
You Got Your Monitor On My Keyboard
Ah, Eee PC, what budget wonders will you cook up next. Wait
a minute, this is actually pretty damn innovative. Asus has managed to squeeze
in an iPhone-sized touchscreen onto the end of a rather thin keyboard. The
result is a novel new way of surfing the net, controling media, and staying in
touch while you’re in the bathroom. The 5-inch, 800×480 capacitive touchscreen
runs in conjunction with an Atom chipset embedded in the keyboard. It’s also
capable of running Skype and MSN, making an ideal addition to your TV room. Not much else is known about the Eee Keyboard but strangely, it’s due out later this month.
What is the ‘Seamless Experience’?
Chock up another one to ASUS as the claim two spots on this
week’s . Now that they’ve finished reinventing the keyboard, ASUS would like you
to reconsider your desktop…your actual, wooden one that is. In something that
retrospectively should have been in Spielberg’s gadget-packed Minority Report,
this redesigned table top is capable of interacting with objects simply placed
on its service. In the demo an external harddrive is set on the glass surface.
Instantly a window appears below the harddrive, displaying its contents.
Dragging the hard drive around automatically pulls the window with it (and we’re
not just talking right-angles here either). In a more frivolous application a
cup of coffee is placed on the table prompting a ring to encircle the base of
the cup. Therein the temperature of the coffee is displayed, thereby creating
an entirely new office betting game. While it’s merely a working concept at the
moment, it may very well find its way into the offices of technophilic
employers in the future.
iPhone? Word.
While this lacks the decidedly futuristic quality of this
column, it is nevertheless long overdue. With the release of Dataviz Documents
to Go Microsoft Office users can now freely edit word files on the go (Excel
editing can be had as a free upgrade if you purchase now, but you’ll have to
wait until its finished). And you don’t have to worry about your .doc’s and
.docx’s getting reformatted as the app use InTact to ensure everything remains
the same as it appears on the big screen. All this for the low, low price of
$5.
