Blowing in the wind
In an official announcement which has now bizarrely been removed from its site, MSI has announced an upcoming Windows 7 "netbook", which goes some way towards blurring the lines between netbooks and ultra portables.
The 1.3kg MSI Wind12 U230 is certainly light and compact, with its 12.1in screen and tasty 1,366×768 resolution, but unlike most "netbooks", this one sports an AMD 1.6GHz Athlon Neo X2 dual-core processor and an ATI Radeon HD 3200 integrated graphics chipset .
The little box of tricks comes with a rather bog-standard 1GB RAM, but according to the product page that-was-and-now-is-not, folk can choose to bump that up to 4GB, for a price, of course. The same goes for the hard drive, which comes at a standard 160GB, or a more expensive 320GB.
The newest Wind offers four hours of battery life, measured on idle, translating to approximately two hours active use time. MSI does say, however, that customers will be able to upgrade from the four-cell to a six-cell battery at an additional cost.
Along with a "brand new MSI Ergonomic De-stress keyboard" - whatever that may be - the U230 also sports a 1.3-megapixel webcam, Gigabit Ethernet and WiFi as well the usual ports and sockets, including three USB options, a VGA connection and HDMI. Bluetooth is an additional cost add-on option.
There's still no word about how much the Wind12 U230 will cost or become available, but we would imagine it will tip up on shelves fairly soon, as MSI won't want to miss out on the Christmas shopping crowd.
