WiMAXed Eee PC 3rd Quarter

Laptop Magazine scored an hour-long interview with Asus CEO Jerry Shen, and while most of the details they got out of him were already unveiled at CeBIT this week, they did manage to squeeze a few interesting nuggets out of him:

• The US pricing for the Eee PC 900 will be around $499 at launch, with plans to drop the price within a few months
• While initial reports have suggested that the Windows XP model will sport a 8GB of flash memory and the Linux version will have 12GB, Shen says the Linux model might have as much as 20GB of storage
• Asus is looking into offering a hard drive option, but any units the company releases between now and June will have SSD only
• Asus is not abandoning its custom Xandros operating system
• Units with built-in WiMax and HSDPA could be released in Q3 2008
• Future models could use Intel's Diamondville processor
• More color options are coming in a few months

[get this widget]