One oddity that popped up at CES last week was the Asus Eee Keyboard--it's basically an entire functioning PC with a 5-inch touchscreen display crammed into not much more space than a conventional dumb QWERTY unit.

And now that some of its specs are surfacing online, after Asus itself was a bit mercurial about its capabilities during the show, it looks like it might turn out to be one hell of a fascinating gizmo. According to sources who've spoken to Boy Genius Report, it's got a 1.6 GHz Atom processor inside, along with 1GB of DDR2 memory and either a 16GB or 32GB solid-state drive. Better yet it supposedly has 802.11n wireless, Bluetooth 2.0, twin USB sockets, and audio out and microphone connectors. Most interestingly of all it also has an HDMI-out connector.

Does this mean that Asus has created a machine that would satisfy many people in search of a media PC? All you'd have to do is hook it up to your HDTV and add a high-capacity external hard drive (or even a NAS one, with wireless N speeds.)

It all depends on the graphics capabilities of the PC, and perhaps whether it'll accept media expansion cards. We won't have long to find out, in any case: Asus' CEO Johnny Shih has said it'll be on the market within six months.

[Gizmodo via RegHardware, BGR]