Laptop Magazine is confirming that the Asus Eee Box is headed to the US. The Eee Box is the first desktop PC in the Eee PC lineup. It’s basically a tiny computer with no optical drive, an 80GB hard drive, a 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU, 1GB of RAM, and a $349 price tag. In other words, it’s a lot like the Eee PC notebook, but a bit cheaper and a bit less portable.

Laptop’s Joanna Stern also shot a little video demonstrating the Express Gate software that comes preloaded on the Eee Box. ExpressGate is the Asus version of Splashtop, a super light-weight, Linux-based operating system that can be installed on a motherboard. You can launch Express Gate within seconds of hitting the power button, which means you can access a handful of programs like a web browser, chat application, photo editor, or Skype without waiting for Windows XP to load fully.

Stern points out that while it takes just a few seconds for the Express Gate interface to pop up, it takes a little longer to actually get your applications up and running. But using Express Gate, you can load a web browser and connect to the internet in just over 30 seconds, while it takes almost a minute just to load a working desktop in Windows XP.

Keep in mind, Express Gate and Splashtop software performance will vary from machine to machine. The Eee PC is running a low-power CPU that’s designed more for efficiency than speed. A faster machine will probably load applications more quickly.

Asus has announced the official pricing for the Eee Box, the first desktop computer in the Eee PC lineup. The Eee Box B202 will cost £199 in the UK, which is about $393 US. At that price, the tiny computer is cheaper than the original Eee PC 701 laptop, and significantly cheaper than the newer Eee PC 901.

Leave it up to LAPTOP Magazine to pull out all the stops and help ASUS with its next line of Eee PC products. Ok, we don’t really want a lot of these gadgets to start appearing in the Eee family but the brilliant and beautiful folks over at Laptopmag.com came up with some pretty clever future Eee PC gear ideas. And let’s be honest ASUS has been taking the Eee brand farther than we thought with the Eee Stick, the Eee Box, the Eee Monitor and the Eee TV. So will we see an EeeCar? Or an EeeCrank? I guess we never know what ASUS will do next.

It looks like Hot Hardware got their hands on the official specs for the Eee PC-branded desktop. The Eee Box B202 shares many features with the upcoming Eee PC 901 laptop, like 802.11n and Bluetooth, but the Eee Box comes in desktop form, which allows the company to give the computer more storage space and a significantly lower price.

Asus is preparing to ship the desktop version of the Eee PC in July. AnandTech got a chance to check out a prototype Eee Box (formerly rumored to be known as the EBOX), and like any good tech site, one of the first things they did was dissect the unit and take a look at its insides.