MSI Wind UK price + Preorder available.

Expansys have put their pricing up for the 10″, XP and Linux versions of the MSI Wind.

The XP Home version based on the 1.6Gz Diamondville (assumed) Atom processor, 10″ LED-Backlit, 80GB (2.5″) hard drive, 1GB of RAM, Wifi, Bluetooth and a 1.3MP WebCam is available for pre-order for 350 pounds. The Linux version is 30 pounds less. By Expansys pricing, this puts it at only 70 pounds (about 25%) more expensive than the 4GB Eee PC. The XP version of the wind is even the same price as the Linux version of the HP 2133!

Looking across Expansys Europe, the German price (for the UK, XP Version) is 459 Euro’s which makes the Packard Bell Easynote look expensive at 499.

Update: US price (UK version export through expansys-usa) is $610.

At these prices, I think the MSI Wind might take the cheap mininote crown, especially with the girls! Interested parties can make their way over to Expansys. (Affiliate link.)

Specifications and details available on the MSI Wind product page.

16GB CF card with 45MB/s write speed is worth a test!

45MB/s is as fast as any hard drive you’re likely to find in a UMPC so folks, consider this Transcend 300x card very fast indeed! It’s CF 4.1 compliant [PDF] and it’s got ECC (error correction) support. In something like the Everun S6S with the supplied CF card adaptor, it would be perfect and probably a lot faster than the internal on-board flash. At 229 Euro for the 16Gb version though, its certainly not a cheap option but I’ve found the 8GB version online for 80 Euros so I’ve gone ahead and ordered one. I’m looking forward to testing it with the Everun to see how fast it is and am even thinking of running an OS on it in the Q1 Ultra. Elmstrom, a member on the portal here, has already tried a similar project with a similar card and he reports "A lot more responsive system." After a bit of research, it’s clear that the Transcend CF cards up to 266x have wear-leveling support  which is very important if you want to use it as an OS drive otherwise otherwise swap/pagefiles can burn a ‘hole’ in the card very quickly. Unfortunately, there’s no data sheet yet for the 300x card so its possible that it doesn’t actually have wear-levelling. There’s only one way to find out!

Technical details: Transcend

Source: Golem.de (German)

Your multi-device Mobile strategy. Poll results and analysis.

Reading Steve Litchfields review of the N82 this morning and then Warners interesting cogitations reminded of the multi-device strategy poll I posted a while back. Only a few days ago I was saying that I had been ‘locked-in’ to the N82 because of the camera and gps-related features and it’s because of this that it’s become my #1 UMPC partner device. It could be better (keys, dim screen, very slow browser, battery life) but right now, I don’t see a device that could challenge it with the sort of media-focused work I’m doing. In fact, partnered with the Q1 Ultra its damn-near perfect and constantly puts a question-mark over my desire for a MID/Carrypad. For me, at the moment, the 2-device mobile strategy is the one that fits best. But what about everyone else? Read on for more about my own strategy and a walk-through of other peoples ideas.

[Read full article after the break…]

MSI Wind in Black and Pink. more specifications.

Mmmm. The MSI Wind is definitely one of the more attractive netbooks around. In white, it looks good. In the velvety black, I like it even more!

The images come from TCMagazine (via EeePCNews) and include a pink one [image below.]  TCMagazine also mention a 7-hour battery life which is interesting but I suspect, as this one is probably based on the Diamondville variant of the Atom processor, it’s with a large-capacity battery which would add to the size and weight. At 1.2Kg and 260mm wide, the Wind could do without more bulk and weight. I’ve also picked up a few more specs via a thread at VR-Zone which I’ve added to the MSI Wind specifications and links page. Web cam is 1.3MP and there could be a free RAM slot inside!

Europeans should keep an eye on Medion if they’re interested in the Wind. They are said to be to marketing it as the Akoya Mini E1210 and have already mentioned a sub-400 Euro price. The Wind is said to be targeting a price range of 299 and 699 Euro with various different models.

ASUS R2E First Impressions

Edit from Chippy: Thorsten, a new member of the team here takes on the R2E…

To date the R2E has not had a full review done on it and since I owned an R2H largely to my satisfaction for over a year I felt I was the best person in the team to take a good look at ASUS’s latest UMPC offering.

ASUS Holland were kind enough to provide a review sample for short term testing. Today’s report will not be a full review however. I will give a short overview and some first impression to give a general picture of what this machine is about and can do. Keep a look out for the full review in the next week.

The postman delivered the R2E to my door exactly 20 minutes before I had to leave for work. It is annoying how these things go but all I had time to do was look at the contents of the package and hook up the R2E to the mains in order to charge. Inside I found,

• The R2E, 800MHz A110, 1GB RAM, 80GB HDD, GPS, HSDPA
• Battery (2Cell)
• Battery (4Cell)
• Charger
• Car-Charger
• USB Mini-Mouse (Logitech)
• Foldable keyboard (Targus)
• VGA-Out Cable
• GPS Mouse
• USB to USB Sync cable (very handy)
• Mini USB to USB cable
• Spare Stylus
• TV-Out cable
• Network Cable
• Cleaning Cloth
• Cable Tie
• Six CD’s/DVD’s including recovery disk and Microsoft AutoRoute2007

XP SP3 released

After delaying the launch of XP Service Pack 3 for an indeterminate amount of time just a few days ago, Microsoft surprised me this morning with the message on my Everun that SP3 was ready for download on Microsoft Update. I took the plunge and after several hours of struggling and one system hang-up SP3 is now installed. Not a lot has been changed but SP3 does contain all previous patches and some smaller new features that in Microsoft’s own words, “do not significantly change customers’ experience with the operating system”. You can read about the changes or head over to your windows update if you want to download the 65MB patch.

Intel, Google, Cable co’s in $3bn Mobile Internet investment

Not living in the U.S. puts me at a slight disadvantage in understanding the mobile Internet market out there but my head is going through a number of scenarios today after reading about the possible, but likely, $3.2Bn investment plan to prop-up the WiMax effort in the U.S.

Intel, a silicon manufacturer, a WiMax chipset manufacturer and mobile Internet platform specialist is giving $1bn. Google, an Internet search, advertising and services company, is giving $500m. Comcast, a cable company, is giving over 1 billion dollars. Time Warner, cable company and owner of AOL (AIM, Weblogs inc., ICQ, Winamp, Mapquest etc) is throwing in $500m and Bright House, a triple-play company is putting in $100m. Where? Into a joint venture that brings Sprint and Clearwire together into a new voice and data company valued at around $12bn. [More after the break…]

HTC Diamond features Opera 9.5 and VGA screen.

Just announced in London, the HTC Diamond looks like an interesting alternative to a MID if you’re a one-man-one-device type of person. With an HSUPA modem, a touch-sensitive 2.8" VGA screen, GPS, Wifi, Bluetooth, Windows 6.1, the Qualcomm 528Mhz platform (as seen in the Xperia) and HTC’s new touch-flow 3D it gets interesting but add Opera 9.5 into the mix (O2 are apparently shipping it with 9.5) along with a YouTube application and you’ve got something that, to my ears, is more thrilling than the iPhone.

The Windows Mobile 6.1 professional software apparently includes the remote desktop app so connecting into your home XP or Vista box is a serious possibility if you need to access full desktop applications.

No keyboard though…..Mmmm. If the Xperia includes all this, plus the keyboard, it’s going to be a very interesting device. Even so, I’m very interested in the Diamond and would seriously consider trading in the N82 for it where it not for the class-leading cam and flash on the N82.

"Available in June in Europe via Orange and the "rest of the world" sometime later" although O2 in Germany seem to have already announced it.

Via Engadget.

Eee PC 900 battery life tests. Thoughts on Atom.

The Eee PC madness continues. There must be 20+ Eee PC web sites by now and every day there’s at least one good set of new information. I’ve even seen a couple of Eee PC books on Amazon which just shows what sort of a market there must be out there. The Eee PC ecosystem alone must be ten times larger that that of the traditional UMPC market and that’s not including the rest of the netbook market! There’s no way we can highlight all the news here in the front page but we are trying to get all the good article links into the links database so that you have a nice central point to find them all when needed. Today, it’s the turn of Blogeee who have written up, what looks like an extensive review on the French language website. One part of it I do understand is the battery life testing section which highlights the extreme end of the battery capacity issue where some users are getting their Eee PC 900 with a 15% smaller capacity battery than was shipped with the Eee PC 701.

In the worst case, a video playback test, the Eee PC 900 was returning under 1 hour with the 4400mah battery which I find a little too low. In fact, if you look closely at the differences between the 4400 and 5200mah results, there’s more like a 30% capacity difference than 15%. I suspect that their 4400mah battery was a little worn. Either that or the real capacity of the battery is even less than 4400mah. The other possibility is that the 4400mah battery is dropping below the power-down level far sooner than the 5200mah battery which looks to be returning results just as expected. 2.5-3hrs isn’t bad at all for an office test but look at how much difference a web-session makes. It’s a result of the Wifi radio and rich web pages that do that. Web surfing is a CPU-heavy operation these days. [Thoughts about Atom after the break…]

Wibrain and Terratec in 120kmh UMPC TV test

I surprised myself yesterday morning when I managed to get live digital TV working at 120kmh. I had heard reports that the dual-tuner DVB sticks in ‘diversity’ mode were good but never expected it to be this easy to get live TV working in the car.

I was using a Terratec dual-tuner diversity DVB-T USB stick connected to a Wibrain B1H UMPC for this test. DVB-T is an over-the-air (terrestrial) digital TV standard that is common in Europe (not in the U.S) and without any real testing of antenna positioning inside the car was able to get a smooth signal at all city speeds. On the autobahn I was up to about 80kmh when it started to drop out but by moving one of the antenna I was getting a good signal at 120kmh. Of course, reception quality depends on where you are in relation to the transmission tower but even so, I didn’t exactly do much to optimise the antenna positions and I dare say that I could have got things working even more smoothly if I’d have tested out a few more positions. For under 100 Euro, this is a great way to add TV to the car if you already have a CarPC, UMPC or Laptop. Taxi and mini-bus drivers take note! More notes and a video after the pic…