If you’re anything like me, you might be tired of lugging around a full-sized laptop from airport to airport and meeting to meeting. Enter the ultraportables. While we are all aware of the cake-cutting Air, manufacturers like ASUS and now MSI are jumping into the ultraportable market with laptops that are usable and highly portable.
The MSI Wind — I wonder where they got the name? — is a 2.6-pound, 10-inch laptop what will sell for about $499 on June 16 from MSI. A Linux version will follow later this summer for $399. It runs a 1.6-GHz Atom processor and offers 5.5 hours of battery life.
Considering the average heavy duty laptop costs about $700-$1000, these mini-machines might make a good around-the-house or on the road laptop. Because they are fully-featured laptops with keyboards and hard drives, you don’t lose any of the functionality and because they weigh less than 3 pounds, you won’t get a hernia. One caveat: a number of these don’t have built-in optical drives, so you might need to get an external USB drive.