MSI U210 – Light On Both The Pocket And The Endurance

Sum n substance:

Thumbs up: Tactile keyboard and touchpad, larger display, decent performance.

Thumbs down: Low battery life, takes more time to boot, gets a bit overheated.

Inside the trunk:

Operating SystemMS: Windows Vista Home Premium (32-bit)

CPU :1.6-GHz AMD Athlon Neo MV-40

Hard Drive Size :250GB

Graphics Card : ATI Radeon Xpress 1270

Size: 11.7 x 7.5 x 1.2 inches

Weight: 3 pounds

THE WHIZ-KID SPEAKS: A bigger screen, double the RAM of a netbook, larger hard drive… if all this is what your looking out for then the MSI has a lot to offer in the form of U210. Though with this one the company has compromised a lot on the battery life… this one is definitely worth a look.

Razzle-dazzle: This one’s design is a departure from the company’s hugely successful X series laptops design. The glossy design and the contrasting black and white palm rests on the keyboard give it a classy elegant look.

The U210 comes loaded with a 12 inch display which is bright and vibrant enough and I would say it is pretty much ideal for full HD display with its 1366 x 768 pixel resolution. However I would add that because this kind of resolution is more suited for 13 inch displays, on this one the because of the resolution the texts look a bit small.

The keyboard of this one has been designed keeping the island style in mind which makes typing on this one a pleasant experience. The buttons rarely offer any kind of flex, keeping in mind that this one has buttons made out of plastic this is pretty much commendable. But I seriously wish that this one would be a bit less noisy. The makers have made good use of the keyboard deck by keeping no black space almost till the end of the chassis.

The touchpad has a pleasantly textured feel to it and is comparatively small at 2.5 x 1.8 inches but that doesn’t make it any less comfortable to use. Plus it comes with my favourite double rocker button. (any laptop with a double rocker makes me go gaga over it. LOL).Leaving all that aside, MSI has surely done a good job as far as the designing of the keyboard and the touchpad is concerned.

Like most of the other inexpensive laptops this one lacks an optical drive and also it gets overheated at times. Coming to the ports… this one has a HDMI output, three USB ports, an Ethernet jack, Kensington lock slot, headphone and mic ports, and 4-in-1 memory card reader along with three USB ports.

Inside dope: The quality of the speakers isn’t all that impressive but then again it’s quite typical for a laptop of this size. The sound quality of the videos on Youtube and Hulu was quite inaudible; however when we played movies and already downloaded songs the sound quality was decent enough.

It comes loaded with a 5 mp webcam and the video recorder is a VGA one and it’s probably the best we ve seen till date. The videos were smooth and there was no display of motion blur most of the times. Also the ArcSoft WebCam Companion 3 software which we had seen in the previous versions is also highly improved.

Technically speaking this one is a lot more than a netbook if we consider the 1.6-GHz AMD Athlon Neo CPU, 2GB of RAM and all thanks to the configurations this one fared above the category average in our overall system performance tests.

This one comes along with a lot of trial software which is to be blamed for the 75 seconds that this one took to boot the Vista. However on the brighter side, it transferred a mixed media folder of about 4.87 GB at a rate of 23.3 Mbps which is absolutely brilliant. Also this one was pretty efficient with multitasking and switching between tasks was almost a cakewalk.

The graphics card performance didn’t offer much to be talked about. It performed quite dismally in the graphics test and took almost 10 secs to arrive at a location on Google Earth and around 9 secs more to sharpen the images.

The battery life of this one again was kind of disappointing. Well like I mentioned earlier the company has compromised on the battery life and like expected this one hardly lasted for 3 hours and 53 mins in our laptop test which is almost two hours short of the ultra low voltage systems.

Nitty- gritty: Well I really don’t understand why this one is cluttered with so many software trial versions. I mean it’s highly ridiculous because most of them are not required by the normal netbook users and this one would have got a better boot time only if the softwares could be done away with. Anyways, this one is for those who are looking forward to get a laptop with a bigger screen and a better performance in most of the areas as compared to the normal netbook at a good price ($479). Though it is not as long lasting as most of the other ultraportables offered by Intel’s ULV processors I guess this is all that MSI could offer at the aforementioned price.

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