After spending a little time on the HP website looking at the HP Mini 1000 Vivienne Tam Limited Edition which, is something that should appeal to the female netbook user more than the guys out there, it was a ‘girlie fate’ that brought the upcoming Acer Aspire One to my attention.

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The Asus Eee PC has already had the Windows 7 treatment and it ran pretty well on the new Microsoft operating system, the pre-beta version anyway. Next netbook up to take the Windows 7 test was the MSI Wind and sure enough, it ran the OS well and passed the test with flying stars. Of course, feeling a little left out and sure that it could compete with it’s Atom based netbook cousins, the HP 2133 Mini-Note came along shortly after and has also been tested running Windows 7. Unfortunately the results aren’t quite so impressive for the HP netbook.

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Due to the ‘rebrandability’ of the MSI Wind netbook, DigiTimes have reported that sales have been boosted hugely and the Wind (and all of it’s rebranded brothers and sisters) is expected to have shipped around 700,000 units by the end of 2008 - more than MSI expected to sell, pushing them closer to the top ten hardware vendor list.

There are many rebranded versions of the MSI Wind in Asia and Europe, which are simply the MSI netbook with a different name attached to them. It seems that customers are clambering to buy these ‘clones’ of the Wind and with a solid build and decent specs for a netbook, it’s easy to see why.

Ironically, 700,000 sales would equal the amount of Asus Eee PC’s sold in September 08 which clearly shows that MSI still have a long way to go if they are going to compete with Asus in this market.

A member over at the msiwind.net forums named tankboyben has posted up pictures of their home designed netbook, a rebranded MSI Wind, the Advent 4211. The budding netbook designer has used wood effect sticky vinyl to cover the lid of the 4211 and to cover the trackpad too:

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Medion and Sainsbury’s have reduced the price of the Medion Akoya Mini netbook to £279 in the UK. That works out at around $480 for the MSI Wind U100 clone.

The medion netbook is only available across Europe and comes complete with a 10.2 inch screen, an Intel Atom CPU, 1GB of memory and a 80GB hard drive. It comes in at the same price as the Advent 4211 (£279 at PC World - UK) netbook and with similar specs they are both decent value netbooks however, the 4211 does come with Bluetooth built in for extra connectivity.

It’s good to see another UK retailer selling netbooks and becoming competitive in doing so, it can only be positive for UK netbook buyers and EeePC.net have also discovered that Medion have reduced the price of their Akoya Mini on their own website here in line with the reduction by Sainsbury’s which is great news all round.

MSI, the producer of the popular Wind U100 netbook, have announced that they will also be producing the Wind U120 within the upcoming months, according to an interview with the head of sales at MSI in Laptop Magazine.

Unlike the Wind U100, the U120 will be capable of supporting 3.5G wireless networking. The U120 will share the screen size of 10 inches with it’s older sibling. Storage will be covered with a hard drive (of between 20 and 40 gb’s according to the interview) as opposed to SSD however, MSI will provide SSD in the future. Further details are sketchy but, this is exciting news from MSI and their new netbook is expected to cost under $600 on release although, details arent confirmed yet.

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.

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.

[via]

Even though the 6 cell battery version of the MSI Wind was said to be available in September, it looks as though Mwave.com is selling them at $570 - $70 more than what we were promised. This extra increase in the price makes the MSI Wind more expensive than the Eee 1000H ($549.99 at NewEgg) even though they have nearly the same specifications.

Your thoughts?

Via [Liliputing]

Just at the same time as Asustek has officially announced new Eee PC 901 and Eee PC 1000 series, MSI officially announces MSI Wind, another decent Eee PC competitor.

Just to remind you that this 10 incher features Intel Atom 1.6GHz processor, an 80GB 2.5 inch disk, Bluetooth and 802.11b/g WiFi, 5.5 hour battery and option to choose between Windows XP Home or Linux based system.

The most challenging fact is the price, $399 for a Linux-based system or $499 for Windows based version makes the $625 price of the new Eee PC 1000(H) pretty tough to justify.