If you’re anything like me, you might be tired of lugging around a full-sized laptop from airport to airport and meeting to meeting. Enter the ultraportables. While we are all aware of the cake-cutting Air, manufacturers like ASUS and now MSI are jumping into the ultraportable market with laptops that are usable and highly portable.
The MSI Wind — I wonder where they got the name? — is a 2.6-pound, 10-inch laptop what will sell for about $499 on June 16 from MSI. A Linux version will follow later this summer for $399. It runs a 1.6-GHz Atom processor and offers 5.5 hours of battery life.
Considering the average heavy duty laptop costs about $700-$1000, these mini-machines might make a good around-the-house or on the road laptop. Because they are fully-featured laptops with keyboards and hard drives, you don’t lose any of the functionality and because they weigh less than 3 pounds, you won’t get a hernia. One caveat: a number of these don’t have built-in optical drives, so you might need to get an external USB drive.
is it called “MSI Wind” because its power comes from a wristwatch-style wind-up mechanism, there being no room for a traditional battery?
I’ve used an Asus N200 for years. Plugged in a normal 19″ Sony + wireless keybord and mouse. If you don’t play games you don’t need a powerfull laptop.
I still don’t know why you need a DVD drive when you travel …. I’ve been using laptops with no DC/DVD for years.
Most soft can be downloaded (at least all the open source and freeware), all the movies can be downloaded (if legal, like in Europe) or ripped from DVDs at home. And so on.
It still seems a lot heavier than my WiFi & Bluetooth enabled, email and browser equipped Palm T|X PDA and I doubt it will fit in my inside jacket pocket.
Those laptops are ugly – MSI
Get a life and leave laptops at home. Go watch TV!
they seem practical.
I have been using the eeepc, with winodws xp, as a glorified PDA/document viewer/email receiver.
It works well (infact it’s what the Psion series 5 should have evolved to), but to get the best out of it you need syncplicity or sugarsync and mobile broadband so that I can access data that I have on my Sony laptop at home connected via broadband.
They are practical and great for lightweight travelling – get one now!
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I thought MSI has announced yet another ultraportable besides the Wind. The Wind is old news — it’s been unveiled for more than a couple of weeks now.
I bought a Fujitsu Lifebook around two years ago, and it’s a fantastic ultraportable. People ask me all the time about it when I’m out working at cafes, etc. It’s a 10.6″ widescreen, ultra-bright LCD, 3 pounds, no fans, dual-layer DVD, suede on the bottom, ~4 hours battery life and excellent power management.
Everybody in the lappy market is scared like hell with the imminent release of an Apple Macbook Nano next week!
Apple will completely obliterate them all!
“The MSI Wind — I wonder where they got the name?”
From the website:
“The Wind, an acronym for “Wi-Fi Network Device,” …”