According to Digitimes, Asus is getting ready to stop production of 8.9-inch Eee PCs this year, as the company sees the mainstream netbook market as moving to 10-inch this year and considering the small differences between an 8.9 and a 10-inch model, it's cheaper to move to a unified display size.
Asus is expecting that 10-inch models will count for 95 percent of its Eee PC volume later this year, once the 8.9-inch models have been discontinued, although the remaining five percent is meant to consists of 7-inch models, as these are used as promotional gifts by certain telco's.
One has to wonder what will happen to the new touch and swivel screen Eee PC T91 which hasn't even launched as yet. These models might not be part of the suggested plans, but as of right now there's no word either which way.
In related news, the Eee PC 1000HE with the new, improved keyboard, the Atom N280 CPU and GN40 chipset has been priced up up Taiwan and its expected to go on sale for a fairly reasonable NT$17,499 (roughly €400/£350/$500). It will ship with a 6-cell battery, 1GB of DDR2 memory and a 160GB SATA hard drive.
You can find the Digitimes story
here