Inspecting gadgets

ACN rounds up the latest and greatest executive gadgets, from the newest ultra-portable to Nokia’s most recent business phones.

MSI Wind ultra-ultra portable laptop

Yet another competitor has arisen to challenge the strangely-iconic Asus Eee (itself recently revamped) - the MSI Wind. This laptop manages to be almost as tiny as the Eee, but pack in a bigger screen and better performance - albeit at a higher price.

The Wind comes with a 10-inch screen offering 1024 x 600 resolution, and weighs in at around 1.3kg, making it pretty darn portable. It's powered by Intel's latest low-power CPU - the Atom - in theory making the Wind very efficient and long-lived, although it apparently doesn't quite match the Atom-powered Eee for battery life.

Otherwise it's fairly standard under the hood - 1Gbyte RAM, 80Gbyte hard drive (none of your solid state extravagance here) and Windows XP as the OS - meaning it should be a fairly competent beast for basic tasks. As with its competitors, the Wind is aimed at users who crave portability above all else - but its very reasonable price point means it is firmly in the mass market. And with more competition from HP, Acer, Dell and others, expect to see more and more people smugly tapping away on little white boxes of fun.