ASUS turned a lot of heads at this year’s CeBIT with their new AIRO concept laptop, which has a keyboard that slides up as the laptop is being opened, to allow for components underneath to have better airflow, thereby eliminating the need for a fan and all the noise that comes with it. By keeping components cooler, it also improves the lifespan, as overheating is one of the surefire ways to fry a laptop. I hesitate to call it a “folding laptop“, as others have done, for obvious reasons…

Ergonomically, a tilted keyboard should just feel more natural and comfortable to type on, while the increase wrist rest area should give your rests a bigger wrist to wrest on. It’s not unlike IBM’s old butterfly keyboard, which folded out of the small laptop to reveal a full-sized keyboard. Then again, that laptop bombed in sales, but maybe ASUS will have better luck?

Turns out that the AIRO concept isn’t just another one of ASUS’s crowd-pleasing concepts that never go into production, like their dual-touchscreen laptop that they’ve been peddling for years (well, that one actually has a chance, but later down the line), as CEO Jerry Shen (clearly stole his name from me) has announced that the AIRO will be available in Q3 of this year, likely to run Windows 7. ASUS clearly still has some work to do with this thing, like making sure it doesn’t fall apart on the third opening, and finding a place to put the battery, but they’ve still got plenty of time - I’d rather them get it right rather than shoot for a release date, cuz if this first one isn’t a success, we’ll be stuck with boring old overheating flexing laptop keyboards forever…
 
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