MSI Wind

Americans are patiently waiting until July 7 to get their hands on an MSI Wind. But not Germans. German consumer-electronics manufacter Medion is bringing its Akoya Mini E1210, a rebranded and recolored MSI Wind, to Deutschland for €399. Oh, and did we mention those Germans get it this week? The machine sporting almost identical specs to the Wind will be on sale at German ALDI this Wednesday, July 3.

The Akoya Mini has a 10-inch with a 1024 × 600-pixel resolution and looks like the MSI’s identical twin in the shots below. While it might lack the Bluetooth found in the Wind, it is bundled with Corel’s WordPerfect. I have reached out to Medion to see if the Akoya Mini will make a stateside appearance, but it looks like U.S. patriots will be waiting for the Wind over the Independence Day weekend. In the meantime, you can buy this MSI Wind e-mail address on eBay. Hey, it’s free shipping!

According to Engadget, today MSI let customers who had pre-ordered a Wind NB know that the highly-anticipated mini-notebook’s ship date has been pushed back again, this time to July 7th. Meanwhile, our friend Brad Linder is reporting that ASUS sales reps told him the Eee PC 1000, 1000H, and 901 will ship in the U.S. on July 8th.

So, if both of these dates hold up, it looks like the first mini-notebooks with 10-inch screens and Atom CPUs will be shipping on almost the same day. Since the Eee PC 1000H and the MSI Wind NB are so similar to each other, we took both this week and put them through a four round face-off. The results were close, but decisive, so it just seems fitting that the two systems launch within 24 hours of each other.

If you’ve been following our MSI Wind coverage, you know that we like the system. We like it so much that we gave it a LAPTOP Editor’s Choice award. Some of the feedback we’ve gotten from readers is that they’re excited about the Wind, but many want an SSD instead of the Wind’s 2.5″ 5,200 rpm hard drive.

SSDs are an exciting technology. In theory, they offer faster boot times, better shock protection, and lower power consumption. In today’s world, SSDs also cost a lot more, offer lower capacities, and wear out more quickly than traditional hard drives.

When we interviewed MSI’s Andy Tung, he told us that MSI had eschewed the SSD because the company wants to give users higher storage capacities (currently 80GB, but eventually up to 320GB) and because “in a lot of the testing, solid state drives don’t always outperform regular hard drives.”

So we wondered: how would the MSI Wind perform if it had an SSD installed, like the ASUS Eee PC 900 series.

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As we mentioned before, the mini-notebook craze could be even hotter than the proverbial egg on a summer sidewalk. Face it: hot notebooks hurt—especially during shorts season. No one wants a burn on their legs from a laptop, a keyboard that heats up your fingers, or a mini-notebook that might cause a hot tub–like effect. So, does the MSI Wind keep its cool compared to other mini-notebooks? Let’s find out.

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There’s a lot to love about the MSI Wind NB: it has an 80GB hard drive, 10-inch screen, comfortable keyboard, appealing design, and an Intel Atom processor that puts every other mini-notebook’s CPU to shame. But at a time when low cost laptops from even lower-profile companies keep coming out of the woodwork, it’s tempting to trust the brand as much as the specs.

We know some folks out there are asking, “Who the hell is MSI, anyway?” For all of you considering the Wind, here’s a quick run-down on the company.

• It’s been around awhile.

Founded in 1986 in Taiwan, the company entered the U.S. market in 1998. In addition to the Wind, it sells full-size notebooks, mainboards, graphic cards, servers, workstations, multimedia products, networking devices, and technology for the health care industry.

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Forget about upgrading the memory on your new MSI Wind. Never mind that the system supports up to 2GB of RAM, but comes with either 512MB or 1GB preinstalled. Pay no attention to the easily-accessible, open DIMM slot that’s just sitting there on the bottom of the system whispering “fill me! fill me!” Just let it go if you want a warranty.

When we were fact checking our review of the Wind NB, an MSI rep told us that we should not list the RAM as being “expandable to 2GB” because doing so would void the warranty. Of course, we’d already written and filmed our tutorial on how to upgrade the Wind’s RAM and, if you’re willing to go warranty-less or you’re reading this about a year after you bought your Wind, it’s an easy upgrade.

What’s ironic about MSI’s warranty position is that the Wind is an upgrader’s dream. In fact, it looks like the lilliputian laptop was built to be modified. Unlike the ASUS Eee PC, which comes with its sole DIMM slot already filled, the Wind comes with an unused slot.

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Every second you sit there waiting for your laptop to boot is another moment you’ll wish you had back when you’re lying on your deathbed and your life is flashing before your eyes. So we were wondering: how many seconds of your life will you wait for the Atom-based MSI Wind to boot as opposed to a VIA-based system like the HP Mini-Note with XP?

Check out how they both performed in the below video.

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The MSI Wind is not being marketed as a gaming laptop and for good reason. You wouldn’t expect a mini-notebook with an integrated graphics chip, a low-power Atom CPU, and a 1024×600 resolution screen to offer good 3D graphics performance.

But sometimes you’re stuck in the airport, the coffee shop, or the in-laws house, and you start twitching, because you just have to get a dose of your favorite MMO. Can the MSI Wind provide a quick gaming fix?

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A while back, we challenged the fiercest typists in our office to a mini-notebook typeoff with the Eee PC, the HP Mini-Note and the CTL 2Go PC. The HP Mini-Note, with an average word per minute (wpm) score of 53.25, emerged the victor.

Now that the newest mini-notebook, the MSI Wind, has graced our office, we had to put it to the test. Our top type-off typers (say that three times fast), Emily “Key Crusher” Kizer and Avram “The ESC Artist” Piltch, took Ten Thumbs Typing Tutor’s “To be or not to be” test on the Wind and emerged with scores of 80 wpm and 74 wpm, respectively.

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