KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
The front is a high gloss finish which looks very well, especially under certain lighting conditions. It certainly looks more expensive than the price suggests.
Underneath there is access to a single DIMM slot, which means you can upgrade the 1GB DDR2 module if you feel its not meeting your requirements. 2GB DDR2 modules are very reasonably priced right now so its not an expensive upgrade (around £35 inc vat). The battery is a whopping six cell unit which protrudes from the back by about 2.5 cm.
MSI do offer a slim 3 cell unit but battery life would be significantly lower so we like the fact they have opted for the meatier unit ‘out of the box'. MSI say the 6 Cell unit has a lifespan of 15 hours, but we will investigate this incredible claim later.
MSI haven't cut corners with the keyboard as I found it a pleasure to work with over the last couple of weeks. I have included a picture of a pound coin over the keys above, so people at home can make an educated judgement in regards to the size of the keys.
I found that typing on this keyboard was relatively good, although I do have big hands and find anything but a full sized IBM style board slows me down, but for the majority of people this will be perfectly usable. There are small ‘bumps' designed into the trackpad to keep motion tied into a physical feedback system.
The trackpad is rather small and I found my finger running ‘out of space' quite regularly and I didn't particularly like the feel of the buttons below it. Multi touch is not supported however MSI have opted to use Sentelic's finger sensing technology. When you use the bundled software the trackpad can be configured to support both horizontal and vertical scrolling by keeping your finger pressed on the specific part of the pad. There is also support on pad clicking implemented which is useful. Swiping to scroll is very intuitive and I am used to a similar system on Apple's iPad.
As seen from this image, the U160 is a very slim chassis design and it is attractive from all angles.
The power supply is a small unit which will not prove troublesome to fit into a laptop case – I have pictured it beside a Nokia E71 phone above to give a good indication of the physical dimensions.
Ohhhh, that gold one is quite attractive for a netbook isnt it ? even the keyboard looks well.
Very purty indeed. I prefer the black one though, gold one screams too much ‘bling’ for my liking.
I was looking at one of these last month, never got around to it. only thing that puts me off is the ATOM CPU which is painful. as ive used one with my friends machine.
Nice machine for the price, at least they put some effort into the design, most of these machines are just churned out to the lowest price point with no attention at all.
Good review, at least the battery life rocks, over 10 hours is wicked for business use. would only need to recharge every evening in a hotel room.
Good review, I like the gold version, ive only seen the black one in stores however, maybe you need to order online for the gold version.
These are ideal machines for a lot of travelling as they dont weight much or take up a lot of space.
Really tempted to order the gold version after reading this.
I owned a few atom laptops before and I have had a hard time adapting to the speed. they are fine for email and checking the net, but I need a bit more power than this, even on the move. still, these are well designed from MSI, very good looking.
I think this range has sold well for MSI and rightly so, its a much better looking design than most of them out there today.