The big netbook guns are out in the halls of CeBIT this year, with MSI, Asus and now Gigabyte showing a raft of new low-cost models. Here’s a round-up of what’s new.

MSI
On the MSI stand, the Wind U100 series has blossomed into the U110, U115 and U123 series. The U110 Eco promises to bring the Wind’s Achilles Heel – its battery life – up to snuff, with a claimed 12 hours on the standard battery. MSI says this is possible with the use of the new Intel Menlow mobile platform, originally intended for Intel’s pet MID (mobile internet device) product category but now half-inched for netbooks.

The U115 is, MSI claims, the first hybrid netbook with both SSD and hard disk storage, but aside from that looks the same as the U110, and both share the same styling as the original Wind U100:

The Wind U123 is slightly higher-end, with a posher, more angular look and aimed at business users, and it brings an integrated 3G broadband adapter to the Wind range:

Gigabyte
Over on the Gigabyte display, the big news is the Thin Note M1024, and it certainly is thin:

A 10in screen and Atom N270 processor put it squarely in the netbook camp, but the MSI reps on the stand are pitching the price around the $600 mark, which may well put it over £400 when it hits the UK in a few months. The M1024 weighs just 890g with a six-cell battery, but the pedestrian black-and-grey design doesn’t do it too many favours in our eyes.

Asus
On the huge Asus stand, Eee PCs are out in force, although there are fewer new netbook models than we’d expected. On its very own stand is the new convertible-tablet model, the Eee PC T91:

Nearby was the svelte range of S models, with the S101 we’ve already seen along with new S101H high-capacity version. There are also some updates to the 1000H in the form of the 1002HA, with 120GB hard-disk storage and 10GB SSD (which somewhat contradicts MSI’s claims to have the world’s first hybrid), as well as the 1008HA, which adds an Atom N280 processor:

The first hint of the abandonment of Windows XP as the default OS for netbooks can also be seen on the stand. One of the S101s I saw is running Windows 7, and there were little cards scattered about the Eee stand proclaiming Windows 7’s brilliance. This no doubt makes Microsoft very happy.

All of these models should be on the streets of the UK in between one and three months’ time, and obviously we’ll be reviewing them in full just as soon as we can get them into our labs.