It looks like an elder sibling compared to the . From its screen lid and bezel to its keyboard, touchpad, and rest of the chassis, the MSI Wind12 U210 is encased in white plastic all over. It doesn't look like a toned-down, "childish" laptop, but an excellent option for a low-cost business netbook. Where most other netbooks in the market come with up to a 11.6-inch screen, the Wind12 U210 offers a nice 12.1-inch widescreen display with 1366x768 pixel resolution. The screen is glossy in nature and good enough by netbook standards. Not only is its screen slightly larger than the rest, but it offers a slightly larger keyboard and touchpad than any other netbook we've seen. For a netbook, which is already unduly compromised with space, this is excellent news. The Wind12 U210 is very well built with the chassis showing no sign of weakness and quite slim despite its six-cell battery bulge at the hinge.

In terms of features, it comes with a standard 160GB hard drive and 1GB of DDR2 RAM (upgradable to a maximum of 2GB). But this is the only netbook we've seen which comes with both Gigabit Ethernet and Draft-N Wi-Fi, and also includes an HDMI port. It also comes with a 3G modem built in, and a SIM card slot under its battery compartment--a feature which will be especially useful when 3G arrives early next year. Three USB ports, twin audio jacks, VGA-out, and a multicard reader are distributed well on its slim chassis.

Performance-wise it offered unprecedented scores in our slew of synthetic benchmarks. A WorldBench 6 score of 40 is a new high, so is a PC Mark 05 score of 1949. Also this is the only netbook I've come across which could play HD 720p videos without a hitch, but not quite good enough for any kind of gaming with a 3D Mark 06 score of 317 (). From various application loading time to plain old bootups, the MSI Wind12 U210 just felt much quicker compared to some . Multitasking wasn't much of an issue on the Wind12 U210 either.

Its onboard sound wasn't very good, but wasn't bad either--plug in headphones and you're fine. The Wind12 U210's keyboard is almost fullsize and extremely comfortable to type on. It has a large touchpad with separate left and right mouse buttons, and frankly one of the most responsive and finely textured netbook touchpads I've come across since the . Both the mouse buttons offer a solid click whenever you press them. The only thing the U210 doesn't do too well on is battery life, which is low at 1 hour 55 minutes on our benchmarks at full screen brightness and high performance battery preset. Expect close to 4 hours on a single charge while browsing the Web over Wi-Fi, which is still acceptable. That is the only chink we uncovered in the Wind12U210's otherwise impeccable armor.

VERDICT