MSI Wind U115 in March, U123 in April

MSI Wind U120 It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything significant about the 10-inch MSI Wind U115. It was officially announced back at CES in January of this year. LAPTOP Magazine is reporting that the U115 will be released towards the end of March, and will feature an Intel Atom Z530 CPU (1.6GHz, 512KB L2 Cache, 533MHz FSB) and will sell for over $500 USD.

The U115 is being called a “hybrid”. It’s going to have both a mechanical HDD hard drive, and it’s also going to feature a Solid State Drive (SSD) in the same chassis. From what’s been mentioned in the past, you’ll have a choice of a 120GB or 160GB 2.5″ Serial ATA (SATA) HDD (you can probably upgrade it later on) along with a built-in 8GB or 16GB SSD. The SSD will have the operating system, while the HDD side will basically function as mass storage and possibly the install location for some of your software.

Next month, MSI will also be releasing the 10.2-inch MSI Wind U123. It’ll feature the same CPU as currently shipping in the ASUS Eee PC 1000HE, the Intel Atom N280. While it will undoubtedly share many of the same attributes as the MSI Wind U120, one thing it won’t be sharing is the U120’s memory limitations. Unlike the U120, the U123 will be upgradeable to 2GB of RAM. There will be four colors, blue, white, “metallic black”, and “burgundy red”, and will have six-cell and nine-cell battery options.

As far as anything larger than the 10-inch Wind lineup, MSI’s Director of U.S. Sales, Andy Tung, had this to say: “there are rumors of 11.6 and 12 inch solutions from other companies. We have that in development and can bring that out of the gate.” Tung pointed out that for now, they consider the 10-inch market to be their main focus.

Read: LAPTOP Magazine