MSI announces line-up ahead of CES

A few days ahead of CES, MSI have gone and announced what they’ll be showcasing to the world with some interesting new products taking center stage.

A few days ahead of the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show taking place in Las Vegas, computer company MSI have gone and announced what they’ll be showcasing to the world with some interesting new products taking centre stage.

Among the models is a laptop that looks set to take the design of the Macbook Air right to Apple’s front door with the MSI X-Slim 320, a model that looks somewhat similar to Apple’s thinnest notebook and even has features that give it a good run for its money.

The X-Slim 320 features a 13.4 inch display sitting at a 16:9 form-factor and a resolution of 1366 x 768. When closed, the height becomes as small as 1.98cm and weighs 1.3 kilograms.

Running off of a dual-core Atom processor, the X-Slim will see itself yield some great battery life for up to 10 hours with an 8 cell battery. Other features include Bluetooth, WiFi 802.11/a/b/g/n, a SIM card slot for 3.5G access, three USB ports, and up to 2gb of DDR2 memory.

MSI wil also be the first out of the gate with a new netbook technology. The MSI U115 Hybrid uses a combination of hard drive and solid state drive to help improve battery life, energy saving features, and become more stable & shock proof as you carry around your netbook.

The idea behind the hybrid technology is to have the operating system run off of the solid state drive while files like pictures, movies and music can run off of the hard drive allowing for better power optimisation and essentially providing up to 12 hours battery life with a 6-cell battery.

A power saving mode called “ECO Mode” will also be included that will turn off the SATA hard drive when not being used and use only the solid state drive to push the battery life further.

It’s not just a change for the U115, the original Wind U100 sees an upgrade in the form of the U120H, a version of the already successful U100 that will now features 3.5G access by way of the SIM card slot found in the new model.

Aside from these cool netbooks, MSI will also be releasing power-saving desktop Winds with the computer integrated directly into a monitor. They’ll run on a dual-core Atom and are said to have power consumption only 20 percent of what a regular PC can have.

Gamers too get their day with new high end notebooks along the way including two laptops that break the coveted 10,000 point barrier on 3DMark.

One new laptop will even become the first notebook to be housed in carbon fibre. We expect that this will make it fantastic-ly aerodynamic to throw at people but suggest people don’t since it’s a laptop and not a paper aeroplane.