MSI spawns Macbook Air look-alike

WHILE MOST manufacturers are trying to cram more and more features into chunky 10-inch netbooks, MSI has spread it thin by taking a page from the Apple Bible and come up with the X-Slim 320, a Macbook Air look-alike.

Scheduled to be shown-off at CES 2009 and launched in the second quarter of 2009, MSI did a pre-show... ermm, showing of the latest Netbook familiar. Possibly inspired by DIY modders who converted an MSI Wind into working like an Apple or by a lack of an Apple Netbook contender altogether, MSI has come up with this little act.

The X-Slim 320 is just half a millimeter thicker than a MacBook Air (ie: 19.8mm) and is beveled at the corners just like the real thing. It'll sport a maximum of 2GB of DDR2 667 RAM, an Atom Z530 1.6GHz processor, a 16:9/1366x768 panel, has Wi-Fi N, three USB ports and weighs just 1.24Kg. However, this not-book lacks the backlit keyboard and MSI also abstained from describing the storage options as these will depend on a hard launch date. The unit should ship with a 4-cell battery although an 8-cell battery will let it chug away for 10 hours or so, says MSI.

The newborn does break the Wintel ULCPC convention that's been carved in stone sometime when things were actually carved in stone. Since the X-Slim 320 will feature up to 2GB of DDR2 and speculation is running rampant about whether the chipset will have a bit of Nvidia's touch or not.

Pricing - and this is according to CNET Taiwan - is estimated at around $800 to $1000. This sounds a bit on the expensive side for a 13.4-incher that is essentially a bigger screen Atom single-core Netbook.

That's $400 to $600 extra for a whole 3.4 inches of real estate and the right to be mocked by Apple fanbois.

Not everything that looks like a Mac and walks like a Mac, is in fact a Mac, you know? µ