Netbook Review: MSI Wind12 U230

We strive for clarity, elegance, and style in these reviews, but their titles usually write themselves -- "Scanner Review: Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300." "Monitor Review: Lenovo L2251x." Today, by contrast, we're stumped. Should the MSI Wind12 U230 begin "Netbook Review" or "Notebook Review"?

We opted for "Netbook Review" because MSI calls the machine a netbook, or at least uses the name Wind for its netbook and nettop systems. But when you think of a netbook, you think of a slightly cramped keyboard and a 10.1-inch screen. The U230 has a full-sized keyboard -- it even has real Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys instead of piggybacking them on the cursor arrows -- and a relatively spacious 12.1-inch display. The word "netbook" almost guarantees a single-core Intel Atom CPU and skimpy 1GB of memory. The Wind12 has a dual-core AMD processor and 2GB.

Too, when you think of a netbook you think of a price between $300 and $400, though a few models do climb into the four hundreds. The MSI costs $480 at Newegg.com, which is more than a netbook but less than the $500 to $600 we expect for more-than-a-netbook ultraportables such as the Gateway EC14 series we reviewed in December. So as you can see, we're torn.

A Netbook That Thinks It's a Laptop PC

At 7.5 by 11.7 by 1.2 inches and 3.3 pounds, the glossy-black-lidded, gray-cased Wind12 is slightly bigger than most netbooks but still effortlessly portable. It goes beyond netbooks not only with a screen that accommodates 720p HD videos but an HDMI port for playing them on an HDTV set, in addition to the usual VGA monitor output and Ethernet and three USB 2.0 ports. There's also an SD/MMC/xD/MS flash-card slot and microphone and headphone jacks, in addition to the mic and webcam perched above the display.

The LED-backlit display delivers 1,366 by 768 resolution. At 12.1 inches measured diagonally, it's south of the 13.3 inches that we consider the smallest of "real" laptop screens, but it looks like a billboard compared to the usual netbook LCD (and makes menu text and icons more legible than the 11.6-inch screens of minis like the aforementioned Gateway). In terms of getting the gray out of white backgrounds, we were satisfied with only the top couple of brightness settings, but colors looked sharp and solid.

Our only real gripe with the display was that its lower bezel collides with the back of the computer, keeping it from tilting back more than a few degrees from vertical. Put it this way: While typing at our desk, other laptops' glossy LCDs act as mirrors of our face, but the MSI's only tilted back far enough to reflect our neck and shoulders. Still, it's a trivial complaint.

Except for the oddity of two backslash keys (one above the Enter key and the other to the left of the space bar), the Wind12's keyboard's layout is nearly faultless, with Ctrl and Delete keys in the bottom left and top right respective corners where they belong and dedicated Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys at the right edge. The keys are also slightly larger than many (including some desktop) keyboards'.

Typing feel struck us as a little light, not flimsy but a bit more plasticky or rattly than ideal, but we had no trouble typing at eight- or nine-tenths of our sprint speed. The fine-textured touchpad and the twin buttons below it worked smoothly.

Real PC Hardware

Under the hood, along with a faintly audible cooling fan, is an AMD Athlon X2 L335 processor -- a 1.6GHz dual-core chip with dual 256K Level 2 caches -- joined by 2GB of DDR2 memory; an ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics controller that borrows 128MB of system RAM; and a 320GB Seagate hard disk. (As with other netbooks and ultraportables, there is no optical drive.)

That adds up to performance that, while not desktop-class dazzling, is noticeably perkier than most netbooks'. The Wind12 rendered Cinebench R10's sample scene in six minutes, triple the time of a fast full-sized laptop but only one-third the time of your average netbook, and posted PCMark Vantage and 3DMark06 scores of 2,222 and 963, respectively. The latter is no match for Nvidia's Ion netbook graphics platform, but comfortably quicker than Intel's default integrated graphics. Loading and running daily applications felt snappy and sure.

Its six-cell battery protrudes from the bottom of the MSI's case, propping the system at a slight angle for typing. We eked out four hours of unplugged word processing, but more varied work sessions with more hard disk activity were in the three-and-a-half-hours or three-hours-and-40-minutes range.

If $480 is beyond your budget, you should know that our test configuration is the loftier of two models. Compared to our U230-040US, the model U230-033US makes do with a single-core Athlon Neo CPU and smaller 250GB hard drive, but offers the same netbook-topping screen and keyboard for a Newegg.com price of $430. Either way, you get Windows 7 Home Premium (32-bit) and a software bundle starring the familiar 60-day trial versions of Norton Internet Security and Microsoft Office 2007, plus face-recognition and cartoon-effects programs for the webcam.

We're big fans of netbooks, but we're bigger fans of more -- more power, more convenience, more value. That makes us fans of the Wind12 U230, which has few direct competitors -- Lenovo's IdeaPad S12, for example, is a 12-inch-screened netbook that starts at $399, but its comparably equipped version (with 2GB, a 250GB hard disk, and Ion graphics) is a pricey $599.

Compared to $1,000-plus ultraportables from the likes of Fujitsu and Sony, the Wind12 feels like a netbook rather than a notebook. But it easily lands among our three or four favorites in the category. Maybe we should put "Not Your Ordinary" in front of "Netbook Review."