Nick Race11 June 2008, 4:00 PM
Eeegads! It’s the Wind, breathing new life (in the form of very nice specs) into the rampantly popular ultra-cheap, ultra-small notebook space.
Page 1 - Intro
What the world needs is more, small, cheap, easily accessible computing devices. That way, we’ll never have to talk face to face again. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, by the way, have you seen the weather outside recently? It seems MSI, along with almost everyone else involved in making any sort of computing equipment ever, have taken a leaf out of ASUS’ design book and breathed life into the Wind.
The Wind is one of the new breed of sub or mini notebooks, that are very, very easy on the hip pocket compared to traditional subnotebooks. The Wind comes in at $699 RRP, so it’s considerably more pricey than the EeePC 4G at launch, but it’s got so much more under the hood.
MSI kitted up the Wind a bit more sensibly than the original Eee. It sports a 10.2in screen, for one, at a resolution of 1,024 x 600. The screen itself is surprisingly good, considering the price breaks expected to keep the costs down, with clear colour reproduction and a good brightness level.
The lower resolution is quite obvious under certain usages, after all, it’s pretty much a stretched version of SVGA, so you will find yourself scrolling bars from time to time to get the full picture. Good news is that the vast majority of the time, it will only be up and down, and not side to side which is infinitely more annoying.
The screen uses LED backlighting, to reduce power consumption for longer battery life. As a consequence, the screen is well and evenly lit.
The Wind’s keyboard is just as usable as the Eee PCs. With what feels like a bit more finger room, the Wind is quite comfortable to type on after becoming accustomed to the smaller size. Our only gripe is that the comma and period keys, of which you’re going to be using at least once every sentence typed (we hope) are thinner than most other keys on the board to fit on the directional arrow keys in the traditional format. It’s a strange place to choose to add inaccuracy, while this writer often ended sentences with a comma more often than not. The keys themselves have a good travel to them, and a nice bit of resistance.
Where a small amount of disappointment seeps into the bubble of HID happiness is the trackpad, which is a little too small for our taste. Though it does track accurately at default settings, it’s easy to skip over your mouse target as the acceleration has to be so high to cover the screen real estate. Once again, it’s one of those things you’d need to get used to when using the Wind on a regular basis.