MSI recently announced a very small Intel Atom processor-powered laptop that is surely meant to compete with the popular Asus EEE.

This new laptop will have either an 8.9″ or a 10″ LED lit LCD screen, a 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU, 80GB of HDD, 1GB of RAM and a 1.3 Megapixel camera. Compared to the Asus, it has much more capacity, but on the other hand, it uses a standard hard drive.

It will come with Windows XP pre-loaded, so it will at the very best, be as cheap as the Asus EEE. Even so, for these devices, I think that a flash-based hard drive is a much better choice.

It’s the iPod vs iPod Nano battle again, except this time they are bigger machines fighting for domination. Given how well the Nano sold, I think it’s safe to say that for portable devices, people will choose the device with the best portability. But I don’t doubt for a single second that this MSI will also sell well, if it’s priced correctly.