Hasta La Gadget!

We had a feeling that MSI’s second Wind, the hybrid drive-toting U115, would sport a better battery life than its predecessor, but we didn’t think it would be quite so spectacular.

Because the U115 features both a traditional hard drive along with a solid state drive, it can use the low-power SSD for often accessed system operations and keep the juice-sucking HD spun down most of the time. over at the German site, Eee-PC.de, writer Johannes loaded up the Wind with a third-party nine-cell battery and fired up the  testing software “Battery Eater” and left it to run. The test began one evening and ran all night and day, finally finishing 25:04:16 later.

The Battery Eater test is one that sits there and sips power — the netbook was doing nothing that it would do in real life other than sitting on a desk. But still, that’s more than a day’s worth of use. Compare this to Laptop Mag’s more intensive test on the nine-cell, carried out in a seedy Vegas hotel room in January. That test pushes the machine far harder, running Wi-Fi and loading a selection of 60 web-pages on a cycle until the battery dies. The result? 10 hours 32 minutes. For normal use, then, you’re looking at something in between.

Is anyone else having flashbacks to the early nineties and five-hour cellphone battery life? The days where you had to carry the charger wherever you went? I don’t miss them. and I won’t miss them this time around, either.

MSI Wind U115 with 9 cell battery in Idle: 25:04 hours!
[Eee-PC via Lilliputing]

Photo: nDevilTV/Flickr

See Also:

• MSI’s Second Wind: Hybrid Drive, Low-Powered CPU
• MSI to Showcase Low-Powered All-in-One Desktop, Netbooks at CES …

(Updates with Arrington post on the Crunchpad)

Quixotic Web 2.0 personality Michael Arrington has been on a quiet quest for the past few months to create an inexpensive web tablet.

Now photos of the device, called Crunchpad, have leaked online. Dustin Curtis, a user interface designer, posted four photos of a sweet-looking machine that could potentially compete with netbooks.

Arrington first wrote about the idea of a tablet in June last year. He suggested a touchscreen device that would run Firefox and maybe Skype on top of a
Linux kernel.

"The machine is as thin as possible, runs low end hardware and has a
single button for powering it on and off, headphone jacks, a built in
camera for video, low end speakers, and a microphone," wrote Arrington. The Crunchpad would also have Wi-Fi, 512 MB of memory, 4 GB solid state hard drive and no keyboard.

The latest photos of the Crunchpad show that Arrington and his team may be getting closer to a finished product. The candy-colored packaging and the Apple-like rounded edges design should be enough to draw in users. Add to that the $200 price tag — if they can stick to it — and it could seal the deal for many users.

Arrington has said he ultimately wants to make the specs available under an open source license so other manufacturers can build on it.

In a post on Techcrunch Arrington said the initiative was often called "Mike’s Science Project," that the device "can be built for less than $250" and described some of the specs:

The last version had a full install of Ubuntu Linux with a custom
Webkit browser. This version has a bottom-up linux operating system and
a new version of the browser. We also switched from Via to the Intel
Atom chip. The total software footprint is around 100 MB total, which
is a solid achievement.

Arrington did not say where in the lifecycle the project is now.

The fact that a Web 2.0 media mogul can turn into a hardware entrepreneur in mere months confirms that the time is ripe for hardware startups, as Wired.com reported recently. The combination of easily outsourced industrial design, overseas manufacturing and accessible online distribution means that it costs surprisingly little to create a new hardware product than it did before.

Meanwhile, as with most things Arrington-related, the latest leaked photos come with their share of drama. The photos were posted to Curtis’ blog, then taken down briefly — ostensibly at Arrington’s request — and are back online now. In any case we have saved them for your fill of crunchy product. Several more on on Techcrunch.

Read on for more photos of Crunchpad.

MSI has announced yet another addition to the Wind line of netbooks. The U123 will join the original (U100) and its slimline successor (the U120), and brings two big new features.

The U123 will have the same upgraded Atom processor as the U120 — the N280 — which runs at a slightly faster 1.66 GHz (against 1.6 of the previous generation) and, more importantly in a netbook, uses much less power. The case itself will be the same, but inside MSI has added a 3G radio and a TV tuner.

Both of these are welcome. 3G, we’re sure, is set to become standard in netbooks this year — they’re so portable it seems churlish to require something as creaky and old as Wi-Fi. The TV tuner is a neat addition, too. I have no 3G in my Wind clone, but I can still get entertainment on the go by hooking up Elgate’s EyeTV via USB. Putting the TV tuner inside makes more sense, and if you couple this with a big external monitor you have a portable DVR.

The tuner means the new Wind gains an antenna socket to complement the usual three USB ports, D-sub monitor connector and SD card reader. There’s also a 160GB HD, 1GB RAM and a six cell battery. The price has yet to be announced but expect it to be a) similar to the current Wind’s $350-$400 and b) heavily subsidized by mobile carriers.

MSI Gets Official About Wind U123 and X320, X340 [Laptop Mag]

Asus will this month further muddy the netbook waters by releasing an Eee PC with an optical drive. The E1004DN will have the usual Atom N280 CPU, a 120GB hard drive and the HD-capable GN40 graphics chipset. Presumably it will also have the usual complement of SD card reader, triple-USB ports and six-cell battery.

We’re stumped. Why would Asus stick a battery-sucking, space-eating optical drive in such a tiny machine? With an optical drive, is this even a netbook anymore? And, most urgent of all, where will Asus put the drive? We guess that the machine will become a lot thicker to accommodate the spindle, therefore breaking the purse-ability (yes, we made that one up) of the netbook.

The price, too, is a little steep — NT$18,000 to 20,000, or $530 to $590. That’s a lot more than a netbook. In fact, it’s close to cheap notebook territory. We understand why many people want an optical drive inside a full-sized notebook — it doesn’t make my MacBook too big, for instance, and it’s useful for ripping CDs and DVDs. But in a netbook? We’d say that if you need an optical drive, it’s more practical to just buy and external USB burner. Cheaper, too.

Asustek to launch new Eee PC with built-in ODD in mid-April [Digitimes vis MSI Wind Forums]

Photo: Matt Biddulph/Flickr

A tipster just leaked these Dell Latitude 2100 ‘Welch’ laptops to us, which have a 10-inch display and are aimed under $600. The best part are the names: School Bus Orange and Red Apple.

Here are the details: they’re a new Latitude notebook design branded for the education market using the Atom architecture. They can support an optional SSD, hold up to 2GB RAM, hit 1.6GHz and weigh in at under 3lbs.

In other specs, there’s three USB ports, SD/MMC slot, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11 a/g/n, Bluetooth, 3 and 6-cell battery options and a possible Touchscreen. Dell’s trying to launch this around May 2009 in time for back to school season. If this leak is true, this is a pretty snazzy netbook for schoolkids for a pretty decent price. [Thanks Tipster!]