A couple of previews of MSI's upcoming X340 have popped up at Hadwarezone and ZD Net Australia, and the reviewers don't seem to have taken a liking to MSI's new notebook.

Both sites cite poor build quality as its biggest shortcoming, although they were in fact testing pre-production engineering samples. So, there's still a chance MSI will resolve some of these issues and use better materials on the production model. There are a few other issues raised by the previews, including the loud cooling system, flex prone keyboard and poor touchpad.

There are some positive things as well, as Hardwarezone found its screen was excellent, and that its Intel Centrino Core 2 Solo ULV U3300 was up to the task of running Vista Home Premium with 2GB of memory.

Hopefully MSI will resolve these issues on the production model, as it's really an interesting and good looking piece of kit, although we are baffled as to why it would send out such engineering samples to reviewers, as it was probably aware of these flaws.

The X340 should hit retail in the last week of April, with prices ranging from €750 for the entry level model, to €899 for the top spec'd dual-core version.

You can check out the previews here and here.

Update:

We were contacted by MSI Europe and the company has confirmed that these are indeed early engineering samples, not production units. MSI assures us that issues raised by the reviewers have already been addressed. As the X340 is to be launched in a month, it's already in production, and MSI claims "a lot of things have been changed" compared to these engineering samples. MSI says the engineering samples previewed by ZD Net and Hardwarezone were not meant to be reviewed at all, only shown off.