The MSI Wind U115 isn’t making the rounds in the US yet, but it looks like some European tech sites are getting their hands on pre-release versions of the netbook. Yesterday we got a battery life report from Germany. And it looks like Polish tech site nvision got some hands on time with a U115 earlier this month.The MSI Wind U115 has a few things that set it apart from other netbooks.

Long before the first Asus Eee PC, OLPC XO Laptop, or even the Psion netbook, there were handheld PCs running DOS and Windows CE. They were popular with a small group of tech enthusiasts in the 90s and the early part of this decade, but they sort of fizzled out long before the netbook craze started.These old proto-netbooks offered stellar battery life and instant on/off capabilities, but ran stripped down operating systems with stripped down apps like web browsers and office suites.

When MSI showed off the upcoming Wind U115 netbook at CES in January with a placard promising 10.5 hours of battery life,  I was a bit skeptical. But according to preliminary tests at Eee PC.de, MSI might actually have been modest.Johannes at Eee PC.de is in the process of running a battery test. Around 4 hours in, the battery meter showed his battery power had dropped to just 79% and he had an estimated 10 hours and 39 minutes of power to go.

Pundits have been insisting for months that Apple has to produce a netbook. At a time when overall computer sales are shrinking, netbook shipments are growing. Budget machines look awfully attractive in the midst of a recession. But Apple has never been known for making budget machines. In fact, quite the opposite. And so those pundits have been predicting that Apple stands to lose a whole lot of money if it doesn’t produce something that appeals to the same price-conscious shoppers that have been picking up netbooks in droves.

Just in case you were worried that Gigabyte’s latest touchscreen tablet-style netbook wouldn’t be available in the US, the FCC has been kind enough to post some picutres of the Gigabyte Touch Note M1028, as well as a series of test results and a complete user manual (PDF link). For some reason the manual refers to the machine as the M1028 CafeBook instead of Touch Note M1028.

Some netbook hackers are happy when they’ve figured out how to replace a hard drive with a solid state disk, or add a touchscreen to their mini-laptops. And then there’s tnkgrl Mobile. For her latest feat of mobile, she added an eSATA port to her Acer Aspire, just above the netbook’s second SD card slot (the one that’s used to extend the main memory on Linux versions of the Aspire One).