After our initial, admittedly short, encounter with a pre-release MSI Wind a few months back we were already excited. We’d heard the peals of dissent from the Eee faithful: “It’s too big and heavy,” they cried. “What’s the point of a 10in screen?” they continued. For us, though, from the first moment we laid our hands upon its smoothly contoured form, something about the Wind just seemed inexplicably right.

Measuring 260 x 180 x 37mm (WDH) it is indeed larger than either Acer’s Aspire one, or any of Asus’ Eees. And at 1.15kg it’s heavier too, but not by much – a few hundred grams is a small penalty to pay for the fine build quality. Wrestle with the base and there’s a little flex and a quiet creak, but it still feels sturdier than all its rivals bar the HP 2133 Mini-Note. The lid is pleasingly stiff, and it’s not until you twist or prod with extreme force that any show-through is transmitted to the display itself.

MSI has put the Wind’s extra girth to good use, too. The keyboard reaches right to the edges of the chassis, outdoing the Acer Aspire one’s fine example by three or so millimetres in height and 10mm in width. One thing it has in common with the Acer is its superiority over the Eee’s cramped keyboard. Touch-typing is effortless, and whether you’re at a desk or in the cramped confines of a sweaty commuter train, there’s little to complain about.

The layout isn’t quite perfect, though. The positioning of the Fn key to the left of the Ctrl key takes a bit of getting used to, and having to depress the Fn key and use the up and down cursors to emulate PgUp and PgDn is fiddly. But, given the full-height Enter key, and the amply spaced, positive-feeling keys, these are compromises we can live with.

And while the Aspire one had to make do with an aggravating trackpad layout – with buttons arranged to the left and right of it to save space – the Wind’s traditional trackpad is a breath of fresh air. It might look like a Mac-style single button, but it’s hinged in the middle to allow for left- and right-clicks, and gave us no problems at all.

The 10in screen offers the same 1024 x 600 pixels as its competitors, but the extra screen space makes everything just a touch more legible. And thanks to the LED backlighting it provides impressive brightness, in fact perhaps too much. Along with the matte finish, this makes it perfect for tapping out emails and surfing the net in the garden, but it has a somewhat negative effect on colour accuracy. Skin tones tended to look just a touch too washed out, and detail in bright areas was missing. It’s no deal-breaker but it’s not quite perfect.

Much of the Wind’s technological blueprint is startlingly similar to its rivals. But it’s hardly surprising that the Wind and most of its ilk (HP’s 2133 Mini-Note being one unfortunate exception) have adopted Intel’s low-power Atom processor. This, the top of the range Wind, boasts a 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor, backed up with 1GB RAM and an 80GB hard disk loaded with Windows XP Home. It’s not a particularly potent combination, but with a score of 0.38 in our application-based benchmarks, it’s capable enough.

The rest of the specification is perfectly serviceable. Wireless networking is catered for by 802.11bg and Bluetooth 2.0 – though there’s no draft-n as found on the Eee PC 901 – and 10/100 ethernet is present too. Three USB ports punctuate the sides along with a 4-in-1 card reader.

Much of the Wind’s allure has, happily, remained intact since our first look, but the 4400mAh battery has been replaced by a frugal 2200mAh three-cell unit. So where the original model promised six or seven hours of light use, the 2200mAh cell lasted just short of two and a half hours. Heavy usage saw that sink to just over an hour and a half. Given the price, the lack of a high-capacity battery is more difficult to forgive than with the Acer, but it’s a tribute to the Wind’s all-round appeal that this doesn’t dent its allure much.

The MSI Wind is, in the main, the breath of fresh air we’d hoped for. It looks good, feels good and its ergonomics are by far the best of the mini-laptop bunch. Its pricing brings it dangerously close to fully fledged laptops, and leaves the value-for-money crown firmly with the Acer Aspire one, but for less than a quarter of the price of a Sony VGN-TZ31, you simply can’t buy a better mini-laptop.