Now, before I get Apple fans knocking my blog door down, I will qualify that statement. It’s obvious that the Mac Air bests the MSI X340 in a few key ways – one being the screen – but, at it’s price of $900, it is a great option.
The X340 weighs a little less than the Air at 2.9 pounds. No, it doesn’t include an optical drive – but who wants one now anyway? You have your flash keys, stop crying. Anyway, it also sports an okay screen with good resolution and a full keyboard. The battery life is a little lacking – it fizzles before you hit the 2 hour mark, but the battery is also user replaceable. So, pros and cons. It does have a little less potent processor and wimpier graphics. But again, for $900 this is a great alternative. First thing I would do is replace that SATA drive with a SSD drive. I would like to see battery life with that in place. It also sports 2 USB ports and an HDMI connection. And, it comes with WiMax built in. Nice touch. You can buy external CD/DVD drives or a Blu-ray drive.
Specs:
Battery
- Battery type included
- Lithium-ion
Connectivity
- Network interface
- 10/100/1000 LAN, Bluetooth, 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n
- USB ports
- 2
- VGA
- Yes
- HDMI
- Yes
Display
- Natural resolution (max)
- 1366 x 768 pixels
- Diagonal screen size
- 13.4 inch
Drives
- Primary hard drive
- 250 GB
General
- Weight
- 1.3 kg
- Laptop type
- Thin and light
Graphics
- Graphics hardware
- Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X4500
Memory
- Amt of RAM
- 2GB
Other
- Integrated webcam
- Yes
Processor
- Processor type
- Intel Celeron M
- Processor speed
- 1.2 GHz
Software
- Operating system
- Windows Vista Home Premium
Sound
- Embedded stereo speakers
- Yes