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.

This one would be launched at the Tokyo game show. An official from Dell claimed on the company’s Facebook page that Alienware will surely invade the Tokyo Game show this year. Even our attempts to contact Dell turned out to be futile with Dell taking the ‘no comments’ stance.

We here at techsoft are waiting with bated breath to see what exactly is in store and we ll keep you posted on the latest developments on this front.

Sum n substance:

Thumbs up: lightest and thinnest notebook, so-so battery life, decent graphics performance.

Thumbs down: bad video quality, bad speakers, uncomfortable keyboard design.

Inside the trunk:
CPU: 1.4-GHz Intel Penryn Core 2 Solo SU3500 ULV
OS: Microsoft Vista Home Premium
RAM/Expandable: 4GB/4GB
Hard Drive Size/Speed: 500GB/5,400 rpm
Optical Drive: 8X External
Display/Resolution: 15.6 inches/1366 x 76

THE WHIZ-KID SPEAKS: This 15.6 inch laptop is the latest entry in the array of the super slim notebooks. Being highly portable this could have quite well been the option for many but the absence of an optical drive would make many of them sway away from it. Also at the same price tag or much lesser one could easily opt for a heavier one with better overall performance. But overall this one packs in a lot of stuff for all those looking out for a basic laptop with plenty of visual appeal and don’t exactly mind the absence of an optical drive.

Razzle-dazzle: This one could easily win the ‘me slimmest notebook’ competition with it’s less than an inch thickness. Well I guess this incredible thin frame is possible only because the company people decided to do away with the internal optical drive. However its got an external DVD burner. Also I could add that this one is probably the most lightweight notebook at 4.8 pounds but here again the external DVD burner weighs about 0.8 pounds. So its almost the same as carrying a 5.6 pounds notebook which is the average weight for any notebook. Its available in two colours glossy white and silver and if you wish to avoid the fingerprint marks then I would recommend the silver one. The aluminium make has been replaced with a glossy plastic weight which again is one of the causes of the less weight.

The slim design not withstanding, this one has been packed with a lot of ports which include the regular audio ports, VGA, Ethernet, 2-in-1 memory card reader, 2 USB ports along with an eSATA/USB port for connecting to high speed backup devices along with an HDMI port for some Hi-def video playing.

The keyboard of this one is quite a large one thanks to the wide chassis design. The keys aren’t spaced out properly with a lot of space in between some which leads to a lot of mistakes when typing. Also while using I had to stretch my fingers a bit too much to make sure that I hit the right key on the right time. This reduced the typing speed to quite an extent bringing it down to 74 words per minute from the usual 80 words per minute. The touchpad is quite large and accurately textured which makes it comfortable to use. However like I always say, I wish they had double buttons than the single rocker bar.

The 15.6 inch display has a resolution of 1366×768 pixels which means that a vertical resolution of 768 pixels users will not have to do much of scrolling while viewing web pages or scrolling through documents. The screen is pretty much glossy and provides much of brightness when viewed directly but when looked at from the top the colours easily wash off. This one could also double up as a mirror at times because you could see your reflection in it at times.

Inside dope:
It comes equipped with a 1.3 megapixel webcam which offers a decent image quality even when the light is not that bright. The images are not grainy and also there is hardly any display of noise except for at the edges.

Coming to the video quality I guess this is probably the last one I would want to go to when I want to watch a video. The video streaming quality is poor and filled with lots of noise. The speakers are also not worth the talk, I barely understand why the ones which are in built in this  one are even called as speakers because I literally had to take my ears near the notebook to actually understand what is being played.

This one comes along with Intel’s Ultra-Low Voltage processor which for all I know has been invented only to save on the space and some power. So I did not like really except much as far as the speed is concerned but even then this one left me hugely disappointed. Putting it through the PCMark Vantage test this one got a terribly low score of 1,850 when the category average is atleast 3,138. Also it took almost 1 minute and 10 seconds to boot Windows Vista which is quite less. However, it could perform routine tasks like web browsing, document processing etc. with a decent speed.

Coming to the battery this one lasted for around 4 hours and 11 minutes even after continous browsing using Wi-Fi. Though this one is quite average but still the company promises to come up with a 9-cell battery in the near future as an added accessory. Also though this one has a ultra-low voltage processor it is hardly any efficient than any of the other notebooks. I could barely see any power being saved considering the fact that it took almost 3 hours and 13 mins to get totally recharged.

I must say that this is quite ‘hot’ a notebook, quite literally actually. This one gets heated up pretty soon especially the touchpad though it wont set your fingers or your lap ablaze or anything of that sort, this one definitely is not a pleasant experience atleast as far as the heat is concerned.

Nitty-Gritty: Well you could go for this one if your looking forward to splurge on something which is sleek, neat and lightweight and doesn’t have much to offer in terms of efficiency. Go ahead pick it up if all that matters to you is the portability.