White Asus Eee briefly spotted today at Amazon.com

ANYONE IN NEED of an affordable yet very portable micro-laptop with plenty of battery life has been keeping an eye on the ASUS Eee. But the long awaited 8G version in white colour has been as easy to get as a Wii at Crimble.

Today, retail behemoth Amazon.com sent out automatic notifications telling everyone awaiting the eight gigabyte models that the elusive white "8G" Asus Eee was finally available at the site, although offered by third party seller J&R.

The joy lasted barely four hours. By then the listing switched back to the " Out of stock" status that has been so familiar to Amazon.com shoppers since the first four gigabyte units appeared on the site.

The four gigabyte and 2GB models have been widely available since its launch but it seems the long-awaited eight gigabyte high-end model is in high demand mostly in white.

Amazon.com´s availability notification sent today

The "8G' units in "Pearl White" colour which were briefly available this morning were listed as having the same seven inch display, a 800 Mhz CPU from Chipzilla, b/g Wi-Fi, and the usual Linux preloaded OS as its lower-spec siblings, but with one gigabyte of RAM and an eight gigabyte flash drive. A week ago the Amazon.com listing showed a "3 to 6 weeks" shipment delay time.

The lucky few who were able to place orders today at Amazon.com paid $499.99 per unit for the 8G white version. If you don't mind not having Appleish-White, the sober black version is indeed available at a not very palatable $550, which puts it near the price of entry-level notebooks with spinning noisy and power-hungry hard disks.

Item was back to ¨out of stock¨ status four hours later

A quick visit to the J &R web site also shows the 8G as "temporarily out of stock". And customers in Blighty can pre-order it from some online sellers for around £259 quid plus VAT. Amazon's UK branch does not even allow pre-orders, showing "We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock".

Asked about availability, Kevin Huang, marketing exec at the firm told the INQUIRER today that the firm is increasing production to please the anxious geeks and geekettes: "The Eee PC has been a great success to ASUS over the past few months. Recently, we see very strong demand for Eee PC 8G in the channels and we’re ramping up our production to fulfil the demand."µ