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Looking to get an Eee PC for less than an iPod?  Sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it?  Well, in its quarterly investors earnings call, Asustek announced a great number of things, including the fact that the baseline Eee PCs will be lowered to $200 by the end of 2009.  It seems 1.7 million Eee PCs were shipped last quarter, and Asus is expecting 1.8 million to be shipped this coming quarter.  There is some bad news for some, though.

Along with the price announcement, Asus announced that the 7” and 8.9” models will soon be phased out in favor of the 10-inch models.  That’s somewhat sad to me at least.  The 8.9” is the perfect size I think, especially if the screens on the 8.9” and 10” are the same resolution.
Asus also announced that of those shipped, 70 percent of Eee PCs had Windows installed, and 30 percent were shipped with Xandros.  While Xandros isn’t the best Linux, the fact that it is so far behind Windows is somewhat depressing.  Installing another version of Linux is incredibly easy, though it does make sense that people want an experience more familiar to them.  Perhaps if Asus followed HP and Dell and released a modified version of Ubuntu on the Eee PC it might do better (Ubuntu Eee works extremely well, even if there are a few issues with it).

The same percentages apply to the storage on the Eee PCs.  70 percent were shipped with hard drives, while 30 percent were shipped with SSDs.  It could just be me, but the idea of a netbook is not to have a lot of storage, and is something that you can carry around a lot.  Sure, the hard drives are sturdy, but there’s no moving parts with the SSDs which makes me very happy.

Read [CNet News]