Commodore Tackles Eee Keyboard with Invictus

By Kevin Parrish
published

Has Commodore become a cloning company?

One of the stranger things to hit the internet this week is news of an Asus Eee Keyboard clone manufactured by long-standing company Commodore. Called the Invictus, the device is frighteningly too similar to the Asus product, sporting a similar LCD mounted on the right. The only difference seems to be the device's outer hull, offering a sleeker, less-bulky appearance.

Although details are scarce, the device supposedly features a Nvidia Ion chipset and a 5.5-hour battery life. Additionally, the Invictus will use an Atom processor, offer wireless HDMI, and will also come in silver when the product becomes available on the market. The LCD screen will even remain on when the external video is running.

Currently there's no word on an actual OS, however it's speculated that the device may come packed with a built-in Commodore 64 and/or Amiga emulator. There was also mention that it may come with AROS as a standard boot option. Unfortunately, solid specs aren't available, and there's no indication of final pricing or ship dates.

Kevin Parrish
33 Comments Comment from the forums
  • nforce4max
    Blast from the past, at least they didn't call it the Commodore 256.
    Reply
  • megahustler
    This should be beige with black keys, no screen, a pretty big Commodore logo - and where's the tape-drive?
    Reply
  • dEAne
    pretty little things to put on the corners.
    Reply
  • Zoonie
    Do we get a tape-drive with that?
    Reply
  • and yet the writer is calling this the clone? seems to me commodore was the orginal
    Reply
  • ta152h
    bodybagand yet the writer is calling this the clone? seems to me commodore was the orginal
    Commodore has cloned before. They created a PC compatible.

    I know it's blasphemous to give kudos to Apple, but seeing Commodore's name reminds me of just what a unique company Apple really is.

    All the others are dead or have left the business. The pioneers, like Commodore, Atari, Radio Shack, IBM, Compaq have all either died, been consumed or left the business. Of the early player, only Apple remains. And not only do they remain, but they are flourishing the same as they did before - with overpriced products.

    Thumb me down all you want, but Apple deserves credit for being the last man standing, and by doing it their own way.

    I'm just hoping one of these decades they make a product I'll actually want.
    Reply
  • ryano
    Well wasn't the Amiga 1000 the first consumer computer that had true multitasking, a mouse-driven GUI, and a mouse ? Not to mention 16-bit color, 4-channel sound, full-screen video, well before Apple produced a comparable machine. It was actually Commodore and Atari who were the innovators..with Apple playing copycat.
    Reply
  • ryano
    Sorry TA152H - I posted before I really "read" your post. Seeing the comments under this article caused me to flashback to my teenage days when computers were mystical devices.. at least my Amiga 500 was..when my friends were beating down our door to play its games and watch the latest cracktros from the pirated software I downloaded from the local BBS.. as all they had at home was an IBM PC with CGA or 16-color EGA if they were lucky.. and forget about bitplanes and color-cycling and sprites.

    It's sad that now the Commodore name has been bought and sold so many times over the last two decades, and now their name is associated with selling peripherals.

    The mid 80's to mid 90's were the quantum leap periods of computer multimedia evolution and will always be fondest in my memory I now have a Core i7 with an ATI5870... what kind of evolutionary leap can I possibly expect in the next 5 years ? The difference between 16xAAA and 16xMSAA isn't all that noticeable to me.
    Reply
  • ianpac
    Apple Mac was launched 18 months before the Amiga 1000. Its only advantage was it was cheaper than Apple but then there is nothing new in that - everyone is cheaper than Apple.

    @TA152H - Apple would have died too if Bill Gates had not stepped in to save them in the late 1990s. Microsoft is the one true survivor because they monopolized the operating system all the hardware suppliers built around.
    Reply
  • ta152h
    ryanoWell wasn't the Amiga 1000 the first consumer computer that had true multitasking, a mouse-driven GUI, and a mouse ? Not to mention 16-bit color, 4-channel sound, full-screen video, well before Apple produced a comparable machine. It was actually Commodore and Atari who were the innovators..with Apple playing copycat.
    Actually, the Tandy Color Computer was the first microcomputer to multi-task, running an operating system called OS-9.

    Apple took the mouse and GUI were the first to put it on a microcomputer.

    Commodore bought the Amiga, and it was a headache they couldn't figure out how to solve until it was irrelevant. The Amiga had a lot of customer designed chips that were supposed to help out the 68K, which was kind of dated by the time the Amiga came out.

    I remember seeing the Amiga and couldn't understand how anyone could even look at it. The screens flickered so badly you'd get a migraine the interlacing was so bad. Eventually, the ironed out the problems, but, by then it was competing with PS/2s running OS/2, and they never really had much of a chance to be anything mroe than a niche product.

    The Amiga was a failure, plain and simple. Commodore did have some successes though, like the Commodore 64 and Vic-20. The Commodore 64 redefined computers for a while, with such a low price and so much memory. It also added sprites, which made for better games.
    Reply