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Being an early adopter is tough. On the one hand, you get cool new gadgets before anyone else. On the other hand, you also get them before the bugs are worked out and sometimes before you even really know what you’re getting.

When customers lined up in Hong Kong to pick up the new Eee PC 900, which sold out in hours, they got a unit with a dinky 4400mAh battery which is barely good for 2 hours of use. Problem is, all the early reviews of the Eee PC 900 had been conducted by reviewers who received a unit with a 5800mAh battery.

According to DigiTimes, Asus says the 4400mAh battery is supposed to come standard with the Eee PC 900 for now, and that the higher capacity battery might be released latter. But this is the sort of thing I hate about early reviews. Companies tend to send out the most advanced configuration of the product and reviewers will write up their response to that product. When consumers want to buy a cheaper configuration (or in this case the standard/only possible configuration), they only have an inaccurate review to go buy.

Anyway, it looks like Asus is thinking about offering the first batch of folks a battery upgrade, but there aren’t many details on that yet. It’s also not clear whether Asus will begin offering a 5800mAh battery when the Eee PC 900 is released in Europe and the US, or if the company will simply update the official specs for the unit. My money’s on the latter, but I’ll hold out hope for the former.

Update (8:21pm): It looks like Asus has decided to go ahead and offer the upgrade to at least some early adopters.