First up, some news on the battery issue with the Eee PC 900 in the UK. Register hardware is reporting that Asus will be contacting owners on July 1st, about swapping their 4400mAh battery for a 5800mAh battery. That doesn’t mean they’ll be shipped immediately – there appears to be a delay while Asus UK waits to physically get the batteries (and not just on paper), but it looks like the situation will be soon resolved.
Next up, Liliputing mentions that Asus has told some customers that the 10-inch Eee PC 1000 / 1000H and the 8.9-inch Eee PC 901 would be available in the US on July 8, 2008. This would put the Eee PC 1000 / 1000(H) in direct competition literally with the 10-inch MSI Wind, which is powered by the same Intel Atom CPU (albeit slightly cheaper).
Finally, SlashGear has put together a review of the Eee PC 901, including an unboxing video along with a lot of pictures. They do note that it is a pre-production unit / engineering sample. They like just about everything concern the Eee PC 901 except the price:
The Eee 901 is our choice on specs alone – faster WiFi, more SSD capacity and Bluetooth as standard, together with a spare slot for future 3G WWAN expansion – but if it were our own money that decision would be a whole lot harder. A great machine, yes, but a few months too late to be the convincing knock-out ASUS hoped it would be.
The criticism about the timing is unwarranted in my view, given that it was based on the availability of the Intel Atom CPU, but I agree with the pricing issue.