MSI Wind to get US release, two versions available

MSI_Wind

MSI is coming out swinging against you-know-who with the US to be the first place the company’s Wind notebook will be released. IDG News Service is reporting that…

“The U.S. edition of Wind will come in two different versions, one for US$549 running Microsoft’s Windows XP. A few things set Wind apart from competitors, including the 1.6GHz Atom microprocessor, larger screen size and a six-cell battery that gives it around six hours of power. Wind also carries an 80G-byte hard disk drive (HDD) instead of a flash memory-based Solid State Drive (SSD)…

…The other version of Wind will use Novell’s SUSE Linux OS and cost $399. The Linux device shares the same screen size, HDD and microprocessor as the XP device. But it carries a three-cell battery that allows only around 2.5 hours of power and does not offer wireless data transfer using Bluetooth, which the XP device does. The Linux version also comes with less DRAM (dynamic RAM), 512M-bytes versus 1G-byte for the XP laptop.”

Of note is that both versions will have a 10-inch screen and the 8.9-inch version won’t be sold here, only abroad. Here are more specs, from a post we did last week.

That $549 version looks mighty enticing to a guy like me, especially the six-hour battery life. The launch date remains “sometime in June” — hopefully soon.