MSI hybrid netbook promises 12-hour battery life

MSI has unveiled another contender in the netbook market which combines a solid state drive (SSD) with a standard hard drive, and boasts a battery life of up to 12 hours.

The MSI Wind U115 Hybrid is built on Intel's Menlow platform, and has an energy saving LED backlit display to help reduce the power draw. It features a 10in screen with a 1,024 x 600 resolution, and runs on a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530 with 1GB of DD2 memory and Intel's US15W graphics chipset.

The storage is split between an 8GB SLC SSD and a normal 160GB hard drive, which can be easily turned off to save power. The operating system is installed on the SSD drive, which helps save power as well as improving performance and speeding up boot times, MSI said.

Weighing in at around 1.3kg, the Wind U115 also packs in all the usual netbook features, such as Windows XP Home edition, a 1.3-megapixel webcam, a four-in-one card reader, three USB ports, Bluetooth 2.0 and 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi.

MSI said that to get the 12 hours of use from the six-cell battery users will have to disable the hard drive, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and webcam, set the speakers to 'mute' and have the power saving mode set to maximum.

The MSI Wind U115 Hybrid will be available from May at £499.