Despite not being fully finished, two demonstration units are running on Asus’ stand. We spent a while playing, in the company of a slightly nervous-looking Asus rep.

The guts of the machine come as no surprise, and include 11n wireless and the now-standard netbook-style spec list of an Atom N270 processor, 1GB RAM and a 16 or 32GB SSD. At the back there are three USB2 ports, HDMI and VGA video outputs plus Ethernet and audio.

The most interesting part is the touchscreen built into the right-hand side of the unit. It has all sorts of clever little apps.

At first glance the screen display looks like a similar interface to standalone-app gadgets like the Chumby. The difference here is that the screen isn’t a separate bolt-on device running a linux derivative – it’s actually a secondary Windows monitor. That means the interface is pretty responsive and a lot more sophisticated than you’d expect. You can even bring up the Windows XP desktop on it if you want, albeit at a very odd portrait aspect ratio.

When you’re not using it to navigate menus, the touchscreen becomes a nice big touchpad to control the mouse on the main display.

There’s a proprietary wireless video transmitter to go with the Eee Keyboard, and although it’s technically an option Asus expects most units to be sold with one. There’s enough bandwidth to show HD video at 720P, and it was working flawlessly on the display stand with the receiver unit a few feet away. Unfortunately Asus was a bit skittish about us wandering off with one of the only two working samples in the universe, so we weren’t allowed to move the Eee Keyboard away from the receiver to see what the range was like.

So, assuming you want a PC in a keyboard – personally I don’t but I can see there might be some who do – the issue with the Eee Keyboard is the price. Asus tells us that it will launch at 550 euros including the video transceiver, which given the exchange rate will probably translate into something around £550.

It’s an awful lot to pay for a low-powered computer running Windows XP, and we’re yet to be convinced that the software running the secondary screen is solid enough not to act up at inconvenient moments.

MSI
On the MSI stand, the Wind U100 series has blossomed into the U110, U115 and U123 series. The U110 Eco promises to bring the Wind’s Achilles Heel – its battery life – up to snuff, with a claimed 12 hours on the standard battery. MSI says this is possible with the use of the new Intel Menlow mobile platform, originally intended for Intel’s pet MID (mobile internet device) product category but now half-inched for netbooks.

The U115 is, MSI claims, the first hybrid netbook with both SSD and hard disk storage, but aside from that looks the same as the U110, and both share the same styling as the original Wind U100:

The Wind U123 is slightly higher-end, with a posher, more angular look and aimed at business users, and it brings an integrated 3G broadband adapter to the Wind range:

Gigabyte
Over on the Gigabyte display, the big news is the Thin Note M1024, and it certainly is thin:

A 10in screen and Atom N270 processor put it squarely in the netbook camp, but the MSI reps on the stand are pitching the price around the $600 mark, which may well put it over £400 when it hits the UK in a few months. The M1024 weighs just 890g with a six-cell battery, but the pedestrian black-and-grey design doesn’t do it too many favours in our eyes.

Asus
On the huge Asus stand, Eee PCs are out in force, although there are fewer new netbook models than we’d expected. On its very own stand is the new convertible-tablet model, the Eee PC T91:

Nearby was the svelte range of S models, with the S101 we’ve already seen along with new S101H high-capacity version. There are also some updates to the 1000H in the form of the 1002HA, with 120GB hard-disk storage and 10GB SSD (which somewhat contradicts MSI’s claims to have the world’s first hybrid), as well as the 1008HA, which adds an Atom N280 processor:

The first hint of the abandonment of Windows XP as the default OS for netbooks can also be seen on the stand. One of the S101s I saw is running Windows 7, and there were little cards scattered about the Eee stand proclaiming Windows 7’s brilliance. This no doubt makes Microsoft very happy.

All of these models should be on the streets of the UK in between one and three months’ time, and obviously we’ll be reviewing them in full just as soon as we can get them into our labs.

Fortunately, the cynicism in my tone won’t stop researchers trying to develop brilliant things that will change our lives but are forever just about twenty years over the horizon.

One of those things is the good old domestic robot. An impressive stand at the Future Parc hall here at CeBit in Germany – a hall dedicated to research projects and the like – is showing off some of the state-of-the-art robotics happening in academia.

The centerpiece is a very big, very shiny, very blue robot called – and I apologise for making you cringe here – “Rollin’ Justin” (those crazy Germans!).

The people who built Justin are part of a research collective called DESIRE – which in German stands for the German Service Robot Initiative. The interesting bit is that it’s focused on a new, formal discipline of “service robotics”, in other words robots explicitly designed to help humans in everyday life, not just build cars or run around little artificial mazes in robotics labs. This was explained to me by Ingo Luthesohle, a research graduate from Bielefield University conducting a postgrad project into ways of teaching robots how to recognize and manipulate arbitrary objects.

“But,” I rudely chimed in as he spoke, “people have being saying that we’ll get domestic robots soon for at least fifty years now. Nothing seems to have happened. When are we actually going to get them?”

Ingo’s point was that robotics has been developing, and it’s moving gradually from being tied to completely fixed, predictable environments (usually industrial ones), to being able to cope with more uncertainty. The issue is that service robots sit at the very end of that uncertainty spectrum: there are few indoor environments more uncertain than your house.

“About fifty years ago, it was all about industrial robots doing fixed tasks,” he explained. “Then twenty years or so ago mobile robots [like Honda's Asimo] started appearing. But service robotics, which is what we’re doing, that’s pretty new, maybe the last ten years.” (Read about Asimo and other creations in our feature).

I looked over at Rollin’ Justin and could certainly see he didn’t exactly look like a mature domestic robot. He’s massive and seems more like the kind of robot you see in car factories, but with an added cutesy-pie blue finish, organic curves and a set of wheels.

Basically, Justin gave me the creeps. As part of his demonstration routine he stretched out his multi-jointed arms; a curiously triumphant-looking gesture which showed an arm span of about six feet and looked, frankly, terrifying.

My heebie-jeebies weren’t helped by his human handler watching Justin like a hawk at all times, a small yellow box always in his hand. On the box was a big red button: a remote kill switch, obviously set up to fry Justin’s insides or blow his head up should he get it into his brain to go on a murderous robotic rampage.

Happily though, Justin doesn’t seem quite up to freeing himself from the bonds of robotic slavery just yet. During the demo I watched – in which he showed his impressive mobility by, er, slowly trundling four feet to the left and back again – he happened to stretch out an arm and bump it on the table in front of him (which you can see in the photo). And then he just sort of stopped. A helpful man at the front of the gathered spectators pulled the table a few inches back for clearance, but the damage was done – Justin had clearly become hopelessly confused. All his fail-safes had kicked in simultaneously while in the presence of squishy, easily decapitated humans. Bless.

Just as well though. When you’ve got a robot in your house – especially one the size and weight of Justin (he weighs 120kg) – safety has to be the number one concern. This is my main objection to domestic robots. You can program every domestic scenario you can think of into its little brain but there will still be an unlimited number left over it won’t know about. A robot can’t, for instance, tell that it’s just knocked a burning candle onto the carpet.

“Actually, it can,” says Ingo, looking just a tiny bit smug. “There’s a project going on to give a robot a type of latex skin so it can feel if it knocks anything over.” I looked a bit impressed.

So then I had to ask the much-vexed question – how long, really, truly, before we all actually get personal domestic robots? A pause for thought ensued.

“I’d say about twenty years”.

On the back of news that Microsoft is to bring Surface to the UK, it’s been showing off the device at this year’s CeBIT. PC Pro got a private hands-on demo with Surface’s director of product management, the superbly named Matt Champagne.

Sitting idle in the darkened demonstration room, the 30in Surface screen showed a screensaver-style pond animation, with rippling water. Just sitting beside it, our fingers were itching to try. Touching the tabletop produced water ripples around each fingertip; swishing a hand across the water gave an effect eerily identical to swishing your hand through real liquid.

Touching the corner of the display brings up a Media Center-style menu of applications. Waving a hand across it scrolls the list, iPod style, with momentum according to how fast you swish. Champagne first showed off the photos app, and it’s unbelievably effective. You can flick photos across the table from a stack, twizzle them round with two fingers to face you, and zoom them with a two-finger stretching motion. The word ‘intuitive’ was never more apt.

Champagne then showed off a few of the more esoteric features. One used Surface to display patient records: select one and you can show that patient’s medical scans in a real-time draggable 3D view.

Second was a slightly less convincing use of object recognition: dropping tokens on the table produced a set of options surrounding that token, the idea being that they’re used as marketing trinkets although we couldn’t immediately see the point.

Finally there was a jukebox. Albums can be dragged from a stack and spread across the table like the photo app. Tapping them shows the list of tracks and then dragging a track over to the playlist windows adds it to the list. Great for parties, but with the 13,000 Euro price tag, not likely to be overtaking iPods this Christmas.

And that price – and the bulk – of the Surface means it’s limited to commercial use for the foreseeable future. Asked if the price will come down, Champagne was cagey but conceded that the development team “still have a lot of work to do to cost-engineer this product”. It’s aimed squarely at “vertical” markets like retail demonstration booths, bars, financial services and education.

It’s not perfect in use either: the liquid-smooth animations when dragging and flicking photos around occasionally stuttered with what’s presumably the enormous processing power required, and our attempts to drag music tracks onto a playlist needed a lot of experimental stabbing before it worked. There was also a tendency for the system to misinterpret drags as zoom actions and vice-versa. Finally, it doesn’t have any ability to sense pressure – it’s all done purely by an array of five infrared cameras watching the scene from below – so the instinct to press harder when something isn’t working is wasted. That need for cameras to get a clear view of the whole surface also means that the roughly 15-inch-deep Surface cabinet can’t yet be miniaturised.

What’s more, it won’t be possible to directly port the same applications from Surface to the multi-touch-enabled Windows 7. Surface’s touch recognition can cope with dozens of simultaneous fingertips, whereas Champagne explained that standard resistive or capacitive touchscreens can currently cope with only two and “maybe three or four down the line”. And although the applications running on Surface are running on a standard PC, there’s a lot of extra dedicated pattern-recognition hardware connected to the cameras.

So it doesn’t quite work perfectly, but when it does it’s almost unbearably brilliant. Don’t be at all surprised if you see it in a bar near you very soon indeed.