CNet UK has had a brief look at the new MSI Wind notebook, which they reckon is good -- "So good, in fact, that it could take the throne from the Asus Eee PC as the best mini laptop on the planet." The site says:
The Wind will initially go on sale with a 10-inch, 1,024 x 600-pixel screen. This, it has to be said, is very, very good, since it doesn't use that awful reflective coating we saw on the HP 2133 Mini-Note. MSI also plans to ship a version of the Wind that uses an 8.9-inch display. They'll both use the same chassis, so expect the smaller version to have a large, unsightly bezel around the screen. . The Wind will ship in both Windows XP and SUSE Linux guises, with the XP version costing £329. Pricing on the Linux model isn't yet confirmed, but it'll be significantly cheaper, obviously.
The Wind has a slightly larger screen than the 8.9-incher on the Asus Eee PC900, which I reviewed in today's Technofile... but Asus also has a 10.1 inch screen version on the way. (They all seem to have the same resolution.) The Wind's battery life may also be better than the Asus, and then there's the keyboard. CNet says:
The keyboard doesn't seem quite as good as the one on the HP 2133 Mini-Note, but it's miles, miles better than the one on the Eee PC 900. MSI says it's pretty much the same keyboard used on its larger laptops -- and that's no bad thing.
The keyboard is the my main problem with the Asus mini-notebooks, but of course, if you don't write and can't touch-type then it may not be a problem.
Also see: Dell may offer a mini-notebook Inspiron
