imageWith a 10-inch/1024×600 display and a U.S. price as low as $399 for the Linux version, the MSI Wind laptop could please e-book fans who otherwise might crave an Asus or another competitor. Laptop Mag‘s interview with MSI exec Andy Tung is here; the full specs, here. U.S. availability is apparently June 3—I’m not sure about elsewhere. Not bad for a Kindle price and a host of uses, eh? Of course, the K-machine is smaller and easier to master.

Yes, there’ll also be a Windows version for $549, with an 80G hard drive, like the Linux one. And a sub-$500 Windows option will be along later. Oh, and get this: Battery life for the Win XP flavor with a six-cell battery might be as long as 5.5 hours thanks to the use of Intel’s Atom chip, which runs at 1.6GHz.

Related: Techmeme roundup and Google News one and MSI Web U.S. site. Also a slew of write-ups on the $549 Asus Eee PC 900, which LM’s Joanna Stern reviewed earlier this week.

Coming later today: “A Week in the life of a gadget-loving e-reader”—the TeleBlog’s Ficbot, a busy K-12 teacher and Asus owner up in Toronto.

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3 COMMENTS

  1. New Readers to debut with $150 to $350 price point
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    – Touch screen and wifi options

    … and there is the new Astak line. A 5 inch model said to be around $150. A 6 inch Cybook style case with WinCE for around $200 (also has touchscreen and wifi options), and a 9.7 inch model for $299 to $350.

    These units have higher memory than other readers– the 6 inch has twice the memory of the new Cybook at 1GB. The smaller ebook runs on Linux, and the larger units run on WinCE.

    The biggest problem is that there are a lot of Mobipocket fans out there, and these don’t support Mobipocket at this time.

    http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2008/05/11/three-new-astak-mentors-beat-one-new-bebook/
    and
    http://www.astak.com/6Ebook_Reader.html

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