14 DAY TRIAL // Notebook manufacturer Micro-Star International has entered the UMPC race for real with its upcoming MSI Wind. The sub-notebook comes with a 10-inch display and has been premiered at this year's CeBIT expo.
MSI's laptop is a stylish, 10-inch ultra-portable notebook that is expected to pose some serious problems to Asustek's upcoming Eee PC 900. Luckily for the competition, it will not be ready until the second quarter of the year, so the Eee PC 900 will have plenty of time to sell. The Wind is alleged to be built on Intel's Shellton'08 platform with the 945 chipset and the Intel Centrino Atom CPU. The processor is expected to be clocked from 1 GHz to about 1.6 GHz, but the actual clock speed is still not surely known.
Some more technical specifications include a 2.5-inch HDD or an optional solid-state drive, 1GB of system RAM, as well as an incredible autonomy of 7 hours, as reported by Notebook Italia. This may look a little odd, but let's not forget that the Atom processor comes with power saving technologies, such as SpeedStep, which should extend the battery life up to 8 hours of continuous work.
The MSI Wind is still on the designer's workbench, but it promises a lot of nifty features that will tighten the competition on the UMPC market. According to the same sources, the Wind will be available in both Linux and Windows flavors, although there are few details about the exact distributions. More than that, Microsoft will phase out the Windows XP operating system starting with 30 June, so there's nothing much left on the market, except maybe for a stripped-down version of Vista at an accessible price.
However, the notebook is rumored to hit the market at prices between $458 and $1072, which cheap Linux UMPC enthusiasts may find a little disappointing. There is no word on the release date as of yet, but if you're looking for more than a cheap Linux PC, then you might want to wait a little bit more before buying a new unit.