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

The Little Gems Hostal is trying to raise Funds too get netbooks for childeren that were previous child labourers. If you are interested in helping out you can get more information here;

http://www.justgiving.com/littlegems and http://help2educate.org/

We care for and provide education to child labourers in Nepal. We visit stone quarries, brick kilns and coal mines to interview children working in dangerous and unhealthy environments. Children are then selected on the basis of the results of our questionnaire, field interview and observation. We do so because we want to help the neediest children.

Thanks.

The 9-cell batteries are actually from Lionbattery/Mugen Power, not from MSI.  Pricing is not available yet and should begin shipping by the end of the month.  Pre-orders will be taken once pricing has been set.

Link (thanks razz)

Discuss here

Engadget is reporting.

story: we’re getting word that MSI has recalled some Wind laptops running SUSE Linux, since some random oddities had snuck onto the disk image. Namely, illegal screener copies of movies and some family photos. That could explain MSI’s temporary delay in shipping this thing out — a preemptive recall — but the when, where and what of the recall are a bit hazy, so we recommend rummaging around for the files just in case they’re eating up your hard drive room or contain that one flick you were dying to watch with large “Screener copy!” signs flashing past.

Where on the file system these files are located is anyones guess but you could try;

sudo find / | grep -e “.avi”

at the terminal and see if that turns up anything interesting, of course the file might also be in .vob or .mpg format…either way it be interesting to know what this is all about.

The MSI Wind is now available in a new color: Noble Red.

Amazon has the 3-cell wind in stock, if you buy from the link on the right hand side of this site, you will be helping to support the site.

Ok, this really is old news now, I think I read about it on the forums a couple of days ago but engadget is reporting on the MSI Wind bare bones Atom PC available from new egg;

This one looks to have actually slipped into availability a few days ago but, for those that don’t
make visits to Newegg.com part of their daily routine, you may be interested to know that the barebones version of MSI’s Wind desktop PC is now available to order for the low, low price of $139.99. That’ll get you the ever-present 1.6GHz Atom processor, along with Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics, 8-channel audio, a generous six USB ports, a 4-in-1 media card reader, a CF card slot, and VGA output, but no hard drive, RAM, or optical drive. Unlike the forthcoming full-fledged Wind desktop, this one also looks to only be available in basic black, but it does at least come with a stand that’ll let you use it upright.

Engadget

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

MSIWind.net forum members are reporting that only the first batch of Winds include the Synaptic touchpad while later batches include the less featured Sentelic touchpad.  The Sentelic touchpad does not have finger sliding scroll features that are commonly found in many touchpads, instead scrolling is done by tapping the corners of the touchpad.  Disabling the touch-to-click feature is also absent from the Sentelic touchpad settings and is causing frustration with users.

Link