Hasta La Gadget!

MSI announced its U115 “hybrid” netbook on Tuesday. What’s a hybrid netbook? One with the ability to use both a solid-state disc drive as well as a spinning hard drive, apparently.

MSI didn’t release a price or a ship date for the U115 netbook, which includes a 10-inch display and is designed around Intel’s 1.6-GHz Z530 Atom processor and its “Menlow” chipset platform. Other specs include the usual 1 Gbyte of RAM, 802.11b/g/n wireless, Bluetooth EDR, a few USB ports, either a 1.3-Mpixel or 2.0-Mpixel Webcam, and 4-in-1 card reader. MSI didn’t draw any overt comparisons to the MSI Wind, the company’s more famous netbook offering.

The real innovation, at least according to MSI, is the 8- or optional 16-Gbyte SSD working in conjunction with the 120-Gbyte or optional 160-Gbyte rotating hard drive.