At the Pepcom event I chat with Asus' President of Personal Mobile Devices, H.C. Hung (pictured) who was unveiling his company's latest cell phones. The Taiwanese company has now grown up from being a PC component suppliers (motherboards et al) to become a "systems" company making from PCs and laptops to mobile handsets.

Of course, I asked Hung about the success of the Eee PC, a cheap and simple to use sub-notebook that caught the entire world on fire. The Asus exec admitted of current compoment shortage that still affects international shipments of the Eee PC.

Hung also said that the company plans to unveil new Intel-based Eee PCs at the upcoming Computex tradeshow in June in Taiwan, with higher screen resolutions and still the choice of either Linux or Windows XP.

"The original idea was to design a machine for emerging countries. They are pretty poor so we need to provide a very cheap model. And actually we found out that in not only emerging countries but also advanced countries like France and the U.S., people buy it as a secondary device, for young kid or wife or to get easy Internet access. So it was a real surprise for us", says Hung.