Toys R Us has been sitting on the retail sidelines as stores like Radio Shack, Best Buy and the faltering Circuit City began offering a wide range of consumer electronics such as iPods.

Determined not to be left out in the cold this holiday season, they’ll begin carrying a wider range of kid-friendly gadgets.  Among them is the Asus Eee netbook.

According to TWICE:

The notebooks will be available in Linux and Windows XP versions, priced at $269 and $299, respectively, and in black and white color options.

The 2-pound notebooks feature a 7-inch LCD screen, an 8GB flash drive, 512MB of DDR SDRAM memory, three USB ports and built-in wireless capability, as well as a built-in card reader, camera, speakers and microphone.

The Windows XP versions come loaded with Microsoft Office while the Linux versions are equipped with Sun Microsystems’ OpenOffice 2.0 word processing office suite.

Toys “R” will herald the introduction of Eee PC products through a comprehensive marketing campaign that includes print efforts and active in-store displays that will enable shoppers to try the notebook. The notebooks will also be promoted in the chain’s Nov. 16 weekly circular.

One thing Toys R Us should be aware of is the increase in returns of the linux netbooks.

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