We can probably expect a flood of MSI Wind laptop reviews in the next few days. While a number of news organizations already have their hands on the computers, they’re bound by non-disclosure agreements which prevent them from giving away too many secrets until Tuesday. But Laptop Magazine did post a few pretty pictures and some video yesterday evening.
The Wind has a roomy 10-inch screen, which is large than the display on the Eee PC 900/901 or the HP Mini-Note. But while the HP Mini-Note packs 1280 x 768 pixels into its 8.9 inch display, the Wind screen (Get it? Wind screen! Ha!) will only display 1024 x 600 pixels. While this is lower than the resolution you’ll probably get out of most desktop or larger laptop computers, it should be plenty of pixels for your average web browsing or word processing needs. And to be honest, the HP Mini-Note display might be a bit too sharp. I spent a lot of time when I first got my Mini-Note adjusting display fonts and setting Firefox 3 to have a default zoom level of 130%.
Laptop’s Joanna Stern also reports that the Wind laptop has a full sized keyboard that can give the Mini-Note keyboard a run for its money. Honesly, it doesn’t look as nice to me as the HP keyboard. But all that really matters is how it feels. And until I can get my hands on one, I’ll take her word for it.
Disappointingly, MSI decided to include an ultra tiny touchpad with a single button for both right and left clicking. This is reminiscent of the touchpad that Asus built for the Eee PC 4G, which was widely panned. Asus has included a wider touchpad with two distinct buttons on the Eee PC 900/901. I’m not sure why MSI didn’t do the same.
