We reported earlier this year that a company called TabletKiosk had introduced eo, its UMPC with technical specifications and pricing. Today TabletKiosk has announced shipments of the eo UMPC device and is the first company to do so in the United States.

We’re very excited to see the first Ultra-Mobile PCs become publicly available for consumers,” claimed Otto Berkes, general manager of the Ultra-Mobile PC team at Microsoft Corp. “The eo is a marriage of great hardware and powerful new software such as Microsoft Touch Pack that presents a new and exciting way for consumers to stay connected wherever they go.”

The standard retail price on the eo is $899 and will come out to over $2048 with all of the upgrades. If memory can be purchased for half the price of the 1GB upgrade and a 100GB hard drive can be purchased for almost 1/3 of the upgrade price from online retailers, we wonder if the TabletKiosk device can be taken apart to accomodate 3rd party hardware upgrades.

The eo can be configured with hard drive capacities from 30GB 5400RPM drives to 100GB 7200RPM drives which will add about $500 to the final price. RAM can also be upgraded from 256MB to 1GB of DDR2 for $265; quite a jump in price for hardware that can be bought for much less as separate purchases.

The eo can be ordered from TabletKiosk directly on its website but will take a few weeks to ship as the company claims to have already sold out. However, an announcement on April 24, 2006 told consumers that there was an issue regarding the back panel affecting the operation of the system fan. The second batch of devices should be ready to ship by the end of this month or early June.