MSI Wind U115 Hybrid: Goes for hours and hours and hours

By Rich Trenholm on 02 April 2009, 5:32pm

Can you feel the way the wind is blowing? The MSI Wind U115 Hybrid laptop has been officially announced and priced today, amid claims of a stonking 12 hour battery life.

It's been a big day for MSI here at Crave. We've seen the quad-core MSI GT725, along with the X-Slim X320 and X340 laptops, and the Wind U123 netbook.

Based on the Intel Menlow platform, the U115 is one of the first to use the Intel US15W chipset, and pulls off full hardware acceleration of H.264, MPEG2, VC1 and WMV9 movies. This takes the pressure off the 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530 processor, so you get longer battery life when watching movies.

MSI reckons the six-cell battery will give you more than 12 hours of juice. Sounds good to us. Exhaustive battery tests involving watching entire box sets of The Office will be included in our review, no doubt coming soon.

Here's some other numbers. The U115 has 802.11 b/g/n wireless connection, Bluetooth, a card reader and three USB connections. The 10-inch LCD screen has a resolution of 1,024x600 pixels for not-quite high-definition goodness.

The headline feature is what MSI describes as hybrid-storage technology. This means the U115 includes solid-state memory as well as a hard drive, which can be used simultaneously. You can also deactivate the HDD with a flick of the wrist via a keyboard shortcut, while continuing working on the SSD. Solid state is less prone to damage from being dropped or kicked or drop-kicked, as there are no moving parts to get damaged.

The MSI Wind U115 Hybrid could be yours in May for £499 from all major UK-based e-tailers.