Pure Touch screen Windows 7 laptop from Asus? (yes, it means no physical keyboard)

ASUS concept shown at Computex 08

The hot ASUS rumor of the week-end is that the company might ship a screen-only laptop (like the OLPC 2.0) in the first quarter of 2009. The laptop would run on Windows 7. Obviously, such a laptop would require additional software to handle the virtual keyboard (the one in Windows is too basic) and finger gestures. ASUS has reportedly not decided how big the laptops would be. Here’s our take:

1/ The screen is the #1 battery life sucker, so we bet that it would be small, as battery life will be a huge problem
2/ Isn’t Windows 7 going to be out in 2010? Steve Balmer just said it last week
3/ To make it really cool, ASUS needs to provide an SDK and get developers (Adobe, EA…) to build custom virtual keyboards

We would love to see such a prototype (“see”, may be not “buy”), but I would not hold my breath for a commercial release in Q1 2009. CES, here we are! [via digitimes (photo)]

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Computers, Rumors, Top Stories