MSI Wind U120

Full Review

The MSI Wind U120 is a very good netbook, its wedge-shaped design setting it apart from the crowd. It could've been a lot slimmer, like the Ideapad S10, despite its 6-cell battery bulge. But we like its contrasting black and white color combination, definitely one of its kind.

It also comes with a black, artificial leather carry case. Its innards are all the same, though: Intel Atom 1.6-GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, 160GB hard drive. But the MSI Wind U120 does get a few things right which others don't: like inclusion of Wi-Fi 802.11n connectivity (the Eee PC 1000HE has it), apart from the standard input-output ports. MSI also successfully deploys a face-recognition technology to simplify logging into the netbook. We found the webcam worked just fine in a brightly lit room.

The Wind U120 has good build quality and nice, tapering keyboard to type one. A tapering keyboard is great to type on while the netbook is kept on a table. But some of the most frequently-used keys, like Enter, are tucked away in a corner. The Function and control key, on the bottom left corner, suffer from the same plight - they are interchanged, making life difficult for people who aren't accustomed to the change. But these are small blips in an otherwise spotless picture.

In terms of performance numbers, the Wind U120 did well with a Worldbench score of 33. We liked the port layout on the netbook, it showed that the people back at MSI put some thought in the process. We also liked the abundance of software it came with, from productivity tools to data backup and restoration solutions. Its 6-cell battery life lasted three hours in our synthetic benchmarks. Real-life usage with wireless internet browsing, and full screen brightness, was well over five hours, which is less compared to the Acer Aspire One 751h and Asus Eee PC 1000HE.

Bottom Line

One of the early heralders of the netbook trend, MSI's Wind U120 keeps the flag flying with features like face-recognition and Draft-N Wi-Fi. It has a cool tapering, wedge-shaped design with contrasting colors, too. But its battery life is disappointing compared to better netbooks in the market.