There are plenty of things to praise about netbooks. Their simplicity, their small form and their portability to name but a few. Battery life is conspicuously absent from this list though. To keep things small, batteries have to be scaled back – it's all a vital saccrifice. MSI's latest addition to the Wind family looks set to change this though, and the U110 ECO promises to offer an impressive 9 hours of uptime from a single charge.

Whether or not these are the kind of results we'd see in everyday use remains to be seen, as most manufacturers are generous in their estimates to say the least, but even if this is exaggerated by 2-3 hours, this is still an impressive increase. Current netbooks' batteries typically last between 2 and 5 hours, and early eeePCs like mine have been conciously underclocked in order to slow the drain.