EeePCNews.de have recently received pictures of a prototype 9 cell battery. The 9 cell battery is currently being designed for the MSI Wind, which currently comes with a 3 or 6 cell battery.

The 9 cell batteries haven’t been priced yet but they’re expected to be available from November. There’s also no official word about the weight of the 9 cell battery, or how long the battery will last. The predicted battery life is 9-10 hours which is a great improvement over the 5-6 hours of a 6 cell battery.

MSI are releasing yet another variant of it’s Wind netbook and this time in the form of the ‘Luxury Edition’.

This ‘luxurious’ MSI Wind arguably lives up to it’s name shipping with either 1GB or 2GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive,improved wireless, bluetooth and an extended life 6 cell battery.

Of course, luxury tends to come at a price and this MSI Wind is expected to cost around 469 euros. The MSI Wind Luxury Edition is available here at German site notebook shop along with an array of extras and upgrades for this new version of the Wind.

If you haven’t joined the netbook bandwagon yet, then you’re in luck or should we say, would be in luck? That is if the market trend in Taiwan spills over internationally, as Digitimes is reporting that netbook vendors are starting to clear their inventory by reducing the prices of their netbooks. These vendors are in rush to free up their netbooks before the year ends.

Except for MSI which could not reduce the price of its Wind netbook, Asus, Acer and HP have all brought down the prices of their netbooks.

Asustek Taiwan has already reduced the price of their oldest Eee PC, the 701 to around $249. It is also planning to reduce the prices of the Eee PC 1000 Linux version to around $530 from $624 and the Eee PC 1000H will get a price reduction of around $31. The Eee PC 901 Linux version will also get a price reduction from around $530 to around $468.

Similarly, Acer has also brought down the price of the Aspire One from around $524 to around $483. HP for its part has reduced the price of its 2133 Mini-Note Linux version from $558 to around $496

Digitimes also reported that more netbook price cut reduction will happen before the year ends.

So, you just might want to hold off your plan of buying a netbook now and wait till this market trend reaches the international market too.

If there will be an award this year for the netbook with the most number of clones worldwide, the MSI Wind will definitely win that award without any objection. Latest information from Cloudbook UMPC showed that there are already 18 MSI Wind clones released so far, including the MSI Worldwide version. And as Liliputing noted, a Wikipedia entry listed 17 clones, but those data may not be updated yet that why it doesn’t tally with the Cloudbook UMPC list.

Each of these MSI Clones sport different names on each of the country. And so far, the most popular of them is the Medion Akoya Mini which was released in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, The Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, France and Ireland.

Here’s the complete list of the MSI Wind OEM’s as compiled by Cloudbook UMPC:

• MSI Wind U100 (Worldwide)
• RoverBook Neo U100 (Russia)
• Advent 4211 (Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Swiss, U.K.)
• Medion Akoya Mini (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, The Netherlands)
• MyBook M11 ( Denmark)
• Mivvy M310 (Czech Republic)
• Tsunami Moover T10 (Portugal)
• Casper Minibook (Turkey)
• Datron Mobee N011 (Turkey)
• Proline U100 UMPC (South Africa)
• CMS ICBook M1 (Vietnam)
• HCL MiLeap MH 04 (India)
• Axioo Pico (Singapore, Indonesia)
• Averatec Netbook (U.S.)
• Mouse LuvBook U100 (Japan)
• Portatil Beep Iridium U10 (Spain)
• Ahtec LUG N011 (Belgium, Netherlands, Spain)
• Sylvania MAGNI Netbook (U.S.)

Those are definitely a lot of numbers for such a netbook which is just the second most popular netbook next to the Eee PC.

Brad Linder Lee Mathews from Liliputing has been testing his MSI Wind out with Vista on and has given feedback on the Wind’s performance.

He first replaced the 80GB hard drive with a 160GB hard drive and chose to install Vista Home Premium. Once the Wind booted in to Vista, it ran very well with a couple minor annoyances. The drivers had to be loaded for both the wired lan and wireless. Also the i945 graphics wasn’t recognised straight away, but both were easily solved.

When running several programs and tabs on firefox there was no noticable different to an Intel Core 2 laptop. However Photoshop CS2 was found to be hard on the Atom processor, but this is the case in XP as well.

Battery life was tested and provided about 5 hours. The brightness was set at 70% and lowered down nearer the end which gave an extra 15 to 20 minutes. Resuming from hibernate and stand by is also quicker than on XP. Overall the battery lasts about 30 minutes longer while on Vista.

We have told you earlier about the price cut in Philippines, but now Amazon.com offers a $50 rebate, so the price of the MSI Wind U100 (10-inch screen, 1.6 GHz Intel Atom Processor, 1 GB RAM, 80 GB Hard Drive, XP Home, 6 Cell Battery) is now only $479.99.

Read more at Amazon.

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Good news for netbook users with the need for a larger sized storage facility - Toshiba will soon be launching a range of solid state drives that can offer you between 8GB and 32GB of storage and read/write speeds of 80MB/sec and 50MB/sec respectively. There will also be a 2.5 inch notebook version with 256GB of storage and read/write speeds of 120MB/sec and 70MB/sec.

Exact release dates and pricing details are unknown but, expect a release towards the end of the year and more information as it comes in.

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Spotted a local PC dealer in one of the Malls in the Philippines selling the MSI Wind U100 at around $549. I immediately checked Amazon and it is currently listing the MSI Wind U100 at an SRP of 552.85. This model comes with the 1GB RAM, 80GB HDD, Windows XP and 6-Cell Battery Pack. That’s definitely a big difference in prices, right?

But wait here’s something more. As part of an ongoing promotion, the said Philippine store is offering to upgrade the memory of the MSI Wind to 2GB and its HDD to 160GB. Now, that is definitely a big steal! The promo period runs until September 30, and I’m hoping to raise some funds to get one for myself. Maybe it’s time to replace my Asus Eee PC 701 4G model by now. Any donors out there? :-)

Incidentally, said store is also selling another version of the MSI Wind called U100Lx. What makes this model different is the fact that it only comes with a free DOS OS. This unit sells for around $422. And the store is also offering to upgrade its HDD to 160GB for free!

If you’re wondering if it’s worth waiting for the 6-cell version of the MSI Wind, Kevin from JKonTheRun puts the MSI Wind battery under the test and gives his opinion.

Kevin performed two tests as the MSI Wind allows you to underclock the CPU with it’s unique “Turbo” button. Both tests were run with Wi-Fi on, 50% screen brightness and Windows power management turned off. BatteryEater was used to perform the tests, which gives the minimum battery life.

On the first test performed, the results were 3 hours and 39 minutes. When “turbo” is turned on, the minimum battery run time is increased to 4 hours and 59 minutes. Kevin points out that these are the worst possible scenario results as every day usage will not consume as much processing as the BatteryEater. Under normal usage conditions, he believes that you could get nearly 5 hours out of the MSI Wind without underclocking, but 7 hours with the underclocking turned on.

Overall, he thinks that it is worth holding out for the 6-cell version, because not only is there added runtime, but the 5200 mAh battery is designed well to nicely into the Wind, without adding much bulk.

For those who are getting bored of the look and feel of their netbooks, French company Skinizi is offering a new way to add some spunk to the otherwise boring look of our netbook’s chassis. Skinizi’s punky skins for netbooks look pretty cool with various artsy designs. But aside from serving as decoration, these skins are also super low-profile protective skins made of advanced 3M adhesive. In addition, these skins are also easily removable, so you can easily switch from one design to another.

Skinizi’s has various designs for our Eee PCs 700/701 and 900 models as well as MSI Wind’s U100 netbooks. Pricing for these skins starts at around $35/piece. It doesn’t matter whether you have the 7-inch or 9-inch netbooks.

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