The First Asus Eee PCs to Ship in Mid-September

Asustek will begin shipping the Asus Eee PC low-cost laptop simultaneously to clients in the US, Europe, China, and Taiwan in mid-September, DigiTimes’ sources at the company say.

The Eee PCs will be available at $199, $239, $349 and $369 depending on specifications, reportedly.

The first round of EEE PC shipments targets 20,000 units. However, the sources at Asustek noted that the persistent short supply of a number of key computer parts might affect production in the second half of the year. The computer maker’s chairman Jonney Shih predicted earlier that shipments of the Eee PCs will top 500,000 in 2007 and will increase to 3-5 million in 2008.

Regarding the U.S. market, the earlier report says the Asus Eee PC will start selling in late September with prices from $269 to $399, depending on configuration. The cheapest $199 model will not be available in the United States accordingly.

Source

[...] The 1.8-inch hard drives are commonly used in mobile consumer devices, as well as in select ultraportable notebooks and in ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs). [...]

[...] The next-generation Eee PCs will feature the Intel’s Core 2 “Merom” processors. It is an improvement over the first Intel Pentium M “Dothan”-based Eee PCs, which are expected to hit the market this month. The 2008 Eee PC models will have reduced power consumption of 7W, which is down from current 11W. The computer maker could also remove the fan to save more power and reduce noise, according to the report. [...]

If these mini-notebooks have regular hard drives that spin it would make no sense, instead the solid state memory stick types would be more useful and make going from you home desktop or other usb port to this new mini-computer.