I almost became an Asus Eee PC owner last week.

While most of my friends are warming up with their month-old Eee PCs, with some even having named their “new friends” with monikers (such as “pinkee”, “slime”, “hood” and “keys”), I almost… almost took home one.

I wasn’t quite sold-out with the chicklet-sized keys.  Somehow, my fingers got used to the “wide strides” with regular sized keys.  Every test unit I used had sticky spacebars and trackpad buttons.  I felt I needed an extra push everytime I needed those keys.  I adored the Eee PC color variants, the pink one was a hit with my girls (wife and daughter).

I was glad I held off getting one, now Asus Eee PC will release Asus Eee PC900 by May 12 (in the USA) and May 1 (in the UK), retailing for US$549.  For the extra bucks one can now get more system RAM (1GB vs. 512MB), a higher resolution of 1,024×600 and more solid state hard drive space — 12GB in the Windows XP version and 20GB in the Linux version.

According to Asus, the new Asus Eee PC900 adds more features than the PC700 version.  The most interesting new feature is something called FingerGlide, essentially a version of the mouse gestures used in Apple’s MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, where you can use two fingers in a pinching movement to zoom in and out of images. I think that these trackpad gestures (whatever they call it) will soon become standard, give or take 6-9 months.

I might try again a test unit and I’m hoping to bring one home very soon.