pocket-lint recently announced their gadget of the year and the wind came out on top in both the best laptop and best product of the year. Beating the apple iPhone to the top place as the must have gadget of the year (don’t tell engadget though).

Product of the Year was fiercely fought this year, however the MSI Wind pipped the Apple iPhone 3G by a whisker to be crowned the “must have” gadget of 2008.

The wind also manged to come out on top over the Toshiba Portege R500

The MSI Wind gained the Best Laptop/Netbook award from Toshiba who came in second with the Portege R500.

Great news as pocket-lint is one of the more reputable sites around.

I have had chance to review one of the new nine cell batteries that have recently come out for the wind and I have to say that the battery preformed well even under a heavy load. You can get the battery here;

For the Black battery go here:
http://www.lionbattery.com/description.php?noproduit=1630
For the White battery go here:
http://www.lionbattery.com/description.php?noproduit=1631

There was a discount code which was “MSIWIND.NET”, which will give you a 10% discount. The price of the battery before the discount is $179.95 (US) and $161.95 (US) with the discount andthat includes free worldwide delivery.

Lion Battery for the MSI Wind Reviewed

Liliputing Has an article on adding touchscreen to both the wind and the acer aspire one here is a video of the touch screen in action;

Read More

Mithinco posted a link to an interesting Ask Engadget article all about netbooks and it seems that a lot of people like the wind, if only their were more than 30 of them shipped…

Lee

The battery life problem looks like it will be getting a solution, in the form of a third party battery manufacturer Mugen Power Batteries and will be distributed by;

http://www.lionbattery.com/

Thanks Galt for inviting us to join this MSI Wind user group. Currently, high performance extended Mugen Power batteries are being developed for the Wind U100 and will come in matching colours. As soon as more specs are available for publication, we will post this immediately here as well.

Mugen Power Batteries also made high capacity batteries for the eeepc with a capacity of 7800 mAh, which showed a significant improvement in battery life over the battery supplied by Asus. This might just help too get a respectable battery life out of this atom powered umpc. More information available here

but they weren’t the first to develop higher capacity batteries for the wind, a nine cell battery was developed by the tech guy, read more about that here

The wireless drivers now seem to ba available for linux, heres the link;

Forums

Well the answer is identical, every component is cross compatible, they are the same machine. The battery of the Wind, the Advent and the Medion all have the same model number (which is BTY-S11).

Personally I think that this is great news, it means that we’ll all have access to the same third party batteries when they come out. The BIOS is also interchangeable with the winds to verify here is my advent running on the 1.05 MSI BIOS.

Their are more very high resolution pictures of the Advent in our image gallery.

On the linux front, ubuntu seems to work very well but wireless and the webcam still need some attention. You can dual boot with the original windows version that came with the advent by resizing the partition that windows is on (using “gparted”) and installing ubuntu/linux on the freed space. Note: you will need the daily ubuntu iso to do this.

We’ll keep you updated on the wireless cards linux compatibility.

“mildy”, a member of the forums, reported that a clone of the Wind will be hitting the selves of PC World very soon and at just £280!
Read the full post here.

This Advent model has exactly the same specs and design as the Wind, so it is essentialy the same.

Here is the link to it on the PC World website;
Advent 4211 Windows XP

Lets somehow hope the official MSI Wind will arrive before the Advent reaches our hands.