Author - Jerry Paxton

MSI’s Wind U200 netbook turned heads with its sleek design and crisp widescreen display. Powered by a 1.4GHz Intel CPU, MSI has upgraded the unit in its successor, the Wind U210. Forgoing Intel, the new Wind U210 features a 1.6GHz AMD Athlon Neo CPU while also doubling the system bus speed to 1600 MHz. Coupled with its large, 12.1-inch widesceen display, the Wind U210 is still turning heads. Netbooks have come a long way in their relatively short lifespan as a consumer product, and the U210 can really be seen as a cross-over in the way that many SUVs are these days. It is way more powerful than most smaller netbooks while not performing as well as a full-fledged laptop.

DESIGN:
The basic layout and design of the Wind U210 has not changed much since its predecessor. The netbook features a graphite composite frame with a sleek shine that eagerly picks up the available light in the room giving the unit a showroom-feel. The roughly 2” x 2” touchpad is functional, but not ideal for netbook usage. It does not feature a slide pad to help navigate large documents or web pages. It does, however, feature a slight texturing to its surface which creates good feedback while not hampering the pad’s slickness.

The netbook’s keyboard, while not as large as a standard laptop’s, has more then enough typing area to be comfortable and not make your hands cramp up the way some smaller netbook keyboards tend to. Each of the keys on the U210’s keyboard also feature what MSI calls EDS (Ergonomic De-Stressing). The keys are slightly concave, more fitting to the natural contours of a human finger-tip. While I do not have any type of stress-measuring device to judge this, I can say that the keyboard feels comfortable even after many hours of use.

The biggest flaw in the U210 is the lack of an internal Bluetooth receiver. It actually took me off-guard as there is a button on the U210’s keyboard with the Bluetooth symbol on it as well as a Bluetooth Assistant program which loads automatically with the operating system. Unfortunately, this assistant is looking for you to attach your own BT dongle. Why MSI would include a webcam and not a Bluetooth adapter is beyond me. Nevetheless, USB-powered BT adapters are only a few dollars on Amazon.

DESKTOP:
Utilizing Microsoft’s new Windows 7 Home Basic OS, the Wind U210 is very stable in the desktop-department. I experienced no hardware lock-ups or glitches denoting an incompatibility and it is clear MSI has done the required work to get the netbook working with the new OS. Applications such as MS Office 2007 worked smoothly and the netbook provided enough power to sift through the fairly complex GamingShogun.com database with ease.

GAMING:
I have always wondered how a netbook would do in the gaming arena and with the U210’s ATI x1250 GPU and shared 2GB of RAM, this would be the one to test it with. I need to mention that our review unit came with an ATI x1270 GPU, at least according to the Catalyst Control Center software. MSI’s website continues to say the U210 is equipped with an x1250. Why this discrepancy? We don’t know yet but will update this review when we find out. Unfortunately, even with this large amount of shared system memory, as well as the x1270 GPU, the U210 is not the mini-gaming powerhouse I had hoped. Honestly, I was not all that surprised – with gaming performance comes a loss of battery life as well as an increase in retail price – neither aspect being appealing in a netbook. That is not to say you can’t game with the Wind U210 – you just have to be very selective of what you choose to play. For instance, the demo for World in Conflict at the lowest possible visual setting yielded an average frame rate of 6. Play a title like Gratuitous Space Battles or even the Flash-developed Bloons Tower Defense and you will be a much happier gamer.

MULTIMEDIA:
Featuring a very bright, and crisp, 12.1-inch widescreen display, the U210 is a treat for the eyes. In helping with this is the fact that the display features a low-power LED back-lighting. Not only is the light distributed more evenly and brightly across the screen, but you will save some precious battery life too!

The 1.3 megapixel camera of the Wind U210 is more than fine for video conferencing and basic web chatting. Here is an example of a 1.3 megapixel image shrunk down to 540 pixels wide and compressed to 70% of its original quality via Photoshop. Yes, I took it at a Starbucks. What can I say? I like coffee.

The Wind U210 also includes both VGA and HDMI outputs on the left side of the netbook. The VGA output performs perfectly for presentations and other more work-related needs. The HDMI port was a bit of let down as I was hoping for better performance outputting 1080p video to LCD displays. During 720p video output, the video quality performed fine. Whether or not the HDMI output issues are due to the CPU, GPU, or some combination of the two is up for debate. If any new driver updates fix the issue in the future, I will update this review accordingly.

The netbook features two small speakers which do an adequate job of providing sound output. There are microphone and headphone ports on the right side of the netbook.

BATTERY LIFE:
MSI estimates that the Wind U210 will last about 6.5 hours while running in what the have dubbed ‘ECO Mode’. For those of you who are not aware of this mode, MSI includes some power-managing presets into most of their new laptops and netbooks. The presets range from ‘ECO Mode’, which gives MAX batter life, to the ‘Gaming Mode’ which uses power much more liberally. During our general-use tests we found battery life to hover from 3 to 4 hours depending on what we were doing and other factors such as screen brightness.

DEVELOPERS:
Being a web designer and programmer, I could not resist the urge to install Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 Beta as well as Adobe’s Photoshop CS2 on the netbook to see how it would work in this regard. I created a small test website with some custom graphics on the netbook’s localhost server and can report that the process was very smooth. There was a slightly longer than normal load time for both Visual Studio and Photoshop but it was nothing very painful. Once loaded, both programs pretty much performed as I have seen them on more powerful desktops, which is to say – well.

CONCLUSION:
Filling the gap between a standard netbook and a full-fledged laptop, the MSI Wind U210 is portable, yet powerful, and will be a welcome addition to both your school bag, briefcase, or even journalist’s jump pack (which is where this one is going).

*DISCLOSURE: MSI gave GamingShogun.com a Wind U210 netbook, which was evaluated over a period of several weeks.