£10 Battery Upgrade For UK Eee PC 900 Owners

Ken E. writes "Asus has backed down in the face of complaints from UK Eee PC 900 owners about the ultra-portable's low-capacity battery. Confusing statements posted in online reviews led buyers to believe that they would get a larger capacity battery than they actually did — and they weren't happy. Asus has, however, made a conciliatory gesture by extending a £10 high-capacity battery upgrade offer. Mobile Computer has the full announcement, plus quite a bit of background on how this fuss all got started. The batteries will be available June 10 and in the meantime Eee PC owners can download a BIOS update that Asus claims will add half an hour to battery life."

Comments

Re:MiyEee PC runs just fine

[Shadow-isoHunt]

I've got a 1.2ghz p3(latitude c610) that gets 14+ hours on two 66whr batteries w/ a 1500x1050LCD, so color me unimpressed.

Re:MiyEee PC runs just fine

[Anonymous Coward]

But is yours a 900 with a 4400mAh battery?

People living elsewhere got higher-capacity batteries.

Re:MiyEee PC runs just fine

[Anonymous Coward]

From my personal experience, the battery widget on Ubuntu is not a completely reliable source... it's more of a ballpark guestimate at best. In particular, the drain it reports doesn't appear to be particularly linear, especially once you get to 20% and below, at that point it starts to "drain" faster and faster.

Return the battery?

[kernowyon]

I cannot see why Asus don't simply ask the 900 owners to send in proof of purchase (receipt or whatever) and £10 to get the new battery pack. What is the idea behind requesting owners to send back their original battery to get an exchange? It would end up with Asus having a stockpile of old, "pre-used" batteries which they then need to dispose of. Or are they planning to re-sell these in "refurbished" machines at some point?
At the moment, Asus have a great lead in the market - the other cheap UMPCs are only now starting to appear and Asus could have kept up their lead by allowing users to keep their old battery and simply send in the proof of purchase and the cash. Hell, they *could* have simply asked for proof of purchase and soaked up the tenner price themselves!
Whatever, the Asus EeePC is still a great little machine for the money. I don't have the 900, mine is the 701, with a 5200 battery pack. The Panasonic astroturfers who have posted to this thread need to look at the cost of each machine before claiming that the Panasonic is somehow miles better! Yes, the Toughbooks are amazing, but they cost several times the price of the EeePC - they are also designed with a different user in mind. The Panasonic is specifically designed for harsh working conditions (building sites, garages etc), where the EeePC is not. Having said that, mine spends a lot of evenings outside in damp conditions connected to my telescope!