Digital Home Thoughts: MSI Wind U135 Won't Blow You Away

"The MSI Wind U135 fell short compared to the competition in terms of software support and battery life. Out of the box the U135 was missing any sort of touchpad software--including on the restore partition--greatly reducing the features. We later found the drivers included on the MSI support website, which brought multi-touch options, as well as simple features like scrolling. Another huge downside to this particular netbook is the battery life, having half the battery life of the ASUS Eee PC 1005PE with the same hardware and only a slightly larger battery. This massive difference in battery life comes from the increased power consumption: The U135 draws almost 8 watts at idle and the 1005PE uses less than 5 watts. Overall the MSI Wind U135 lacked a great deal of polish, but with improvements in power consumption and software out of the box, it would be a great little netbook."

Kind of shocking that the battery performance is so poor compared to a relatively similar machine. Hopefully this is something they can fix rather quickly or else I can't imagine these will sell too well.5