MSI Wind delayed a couple weeks, battery life slashed

Well, some small and then large disappointment on the MSI Wind front. If you've eagerly been awaiting MSI's Eee-killer, you may have noticed that they weren't available yesterday, as promised at Computex. They have now been pushed back to a Friday, June 27th release.

Two weeks won't kill anyone. That's fine. Not fine, however: the six-cell battery has been slashed to a three-cell due to "industry wide shortages." The price is being reduced to $479 to compensate, with the promise of six-cell batteries being available in the coming months, but slashing the battery in half immediately nerfs one of the Wind's killer features compared to the Eee: it's astonishing six-hour battery life.

For me, that means waiting another couple months before buying a Wind entirely... and at the current rate of release for new mini-notebooks, that could well mean that the Wind will have been toppled from the top spot by then... perhaps by Dell's line of attractive (though embarrassingly named) E series of subnotebooks.

MSI Wind Online Fulfillment Page [Official Site via thegadgetsite]