Laptop Mag, the people who always get cool stuff before you, have received their latest pre-Christmas present - the Dell Inspiron Mini 12. As you can surmise, the Inspiron Mini 12 is the big brother of the Inspiron Mini 9 - the 9" super-portable netbook from Dell. Not surprisingly, the Mini 12 has a 12" screen and with this larger footprint comes a full sized keyboard.
The Inspiron Mini 12 is less than 1" thick and when placed next to Toshiba's thin (but pricey) R500, it actually appeared that the Inspiron had a greater case of Anorexia than the Tosh (which is a good thing in this instance). Whether opting for a 3 or 6-cell battery the Mini 12 weighs less than 3 pounds.
The 12" screeen is of the glossy variety and has a nice large resolution of 1280x800. Compare this to your standard 10" netbook such as the Eee PC 1000H or Samsung NC10 where you are getting a noticably smaller resolution of 1024x600.
But the good news ends here folks - the Inspiron Mini 12 comes bundles with Vista, an OS proven to run terribly on underpowered netbooks. Also, the HDD is a 1.8" 40GB 4200RPM model which performs pitifully. It took a whopping 4 minutes before the Vista desktop was viewable and all stock installed programs had stopped loading. That's just not acceptable in my book.
And at the end of this day is this even a netbook? Its got a whopping 12" screen and although its slim and light the footprint resembles that of Bigfoot (comparatively...).
Read the full article and check out a couple of vids over at the original, here.
3 comments:
The only reason the Mini 12 interests me is the Silverthorne based Atom, and the Poulsbo chipset that goes with it. It's the first time someone has used one of these things in a "netbook", instead of the Diamondville based Atom and the ancient 945G chipset it gets shackled to. The Silverthorne platform is built to use less power then Diamondville, so it would be nice to see them showing up in Eees and the like.
Yeah well all we can really go on at the moment is Laptop mag's report and it sounds like the Z530 wasn't the best. 'Sluggish Performance' doesn't translate to a good CPU in anyone's language. But then again 1GB RAM (non-upgradeable) in Vista is not doing anyone any favors.
I don't really like this machine.
I don't know, I suspect it was Vista that was slaughtering that PC. The N270 and the Z530 have almost identical specs apart from the power draw. Both at 1.6GHz, with a 533MHz FSB and 512KB of L2. It's just that the Z530 manages it at a lower voltage and TDP.
Intel's spec find shows almost no differences.
N270
http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SLB73
Z530
http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SLB6P
Maybe the Poulbro chipset isn't as fast as the 945? That would be pretty sad, considering the 945 is something like 4 years old... Hopefully someone will start doing objective benchmarks on this stuff, as opposed to subjective tests.
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