LG got a lot of attention yesterday when the company announced its upcoming X110 mini-laptop at the IFA show in Berlin. But aside from the optional 3G wireless support, the X110 looks a lot like pretty much every other liliputer on the market today. And you know what? There might be a good reason for that. Blogeee makes a pretty good case that the X110 is just another rebranded MSI Wind laptop — albeit one with a slightly different chassis than other Wind clones like the Medion Akoya Mini or the Advent 4211.
Here’s the evidence. On paper, the two laptops look pretty similar. They have 10 inch displays, 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPUs, 802.11b/g support, an SD card reader and 3 USB ports and 1.3MP cameras. And if you check out some of the hands-on pictures that Engadget shot at IFA, you’ll see that while the X110 case certainly looks different from the Wind’s (it’s not quite as rounded and seems to be a different shade than most MSI Wind-a-likes), most of the major features are in the same place. The webcam and power button look a bit different. But it’s not like it would have been tough for MSI to make a few modifications.
It’s possible that the X110 isn’t really an MSI product, but if it’s not, it certainly looks like it’s been inspired by the Wind.
“Inspired by”, possibly, but it doesn’t really look much like the Wind. The plastic mouldings and keyboard might be easy to change, but I doubt MSI would re-engineer the whole system board (note the swapped USB port and card reader) just for one OEM.
Of course, MSI may have manufactured some or all of the compoents in this netbook, but that doesn’t mean that it is a Wind.