Sneak peek into MSI’s new products

I think the very sunny Austrian mountains (yes, it’s a hard life) might have helped here, but MSI gave bit-tech a quick sneaky idea into what’s coming up in a couple of weeks at this year’s Computex in Taiwan.

Wind

First off, unless you've been living under a rock you'll probably be aware that MSI will be launching its Wind notebook (netbook) and desktop (nettop) at Computex with Intel Atom processors. What MSI did make clear was that it is not expecting it to compete with Asus’ EeePC as it will be a bigger form factor, although it’s still expected to be very inexpensive. We suspect this is also partly because competing with the EeePC's supreme popularity is tough and MSI doesn't want to be branded an "Eee-clone".

Going Green(er)

While MSI launched its ECOlution products at CeBIT, it further expanded on its green movement by highlighting that the packaging is now made from recycled materials, and can easily be recycled again. The ink too will be made from biodegradable Soya substrate, which sounds delicious. The entry level Neo products you buy from June/July onwards will now come in a simple shade of yellow because of this because they use less ink and the basic recycled cardboard colour is now visible.

MSI was also keen to note that all its components sourced were RoHS compliant, even for countries that don’t enforce this, although it didn’t go as far as to specify environmentally sustainable resources and divulge into the overall MSI Carbon Footprint (which is probably "considerable" given the air travel for 40 journalists plus staff to Austria...).

In Car

Also launching are new, low power in-car products that can provide single or multiple screens and presumably plenty of features. They are based around MSI’s new mini-ITX range but they won’t be Atom products – we pressed MSI for more details but we couldn't get the staff inebriated enough they wouldn’t give any yet. bit-tech was told that they will be a complete package including power adapter but what software you’ll get and whether it's a barebones or entire PC, we’ve yet to find out. Don't worry, we will keep harassing MSI employees via email and MSN!

Want to speculate with us? GPS? Media Player? Auto-Driving AI? Engine valve timing remapping? Increasing MPG making it "Greener"? Let us know what you think, in the forums.