After unveiling the low-cost Eee PC at Computex back in June, Asus is now getting ready to begin shipping some 20,000 Eee PC notebooks to clients in the US, Europe, China and Taiwan, as soon as next month.

The Eee PCs will be available at $199, $239, $349 and $369 depending on specifications. However, the first-round shipments will be mostly of the $349 model, which targets the mainstream. The company intends to ship 500,000 Eee PCs by the end of the year, and in 2008 the production should hit 3-5 million units. In addition to securing orders from the mentioned countries, Asus has also landed orders for its Eee PCs from a number of education organizations, insurance companies and emerging markets for bulk deals.

The 7-inch screen notebook is based on an Intel mobile chipset and CPU and will reportedly be equipped with 512MB of DDR2-400 memory and 2-16GB of flash memory, 4- or 6-cell battery, card-reader, 0.3Mpixel webcam, and built-in Wi-Fi. On the software side, it will come with a Linux-based OS preinstalled by default, but Asus claims that it will also be Windows OS compatible.