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Friday, November 20, 2009

Dell Inspiron Mini 10 Netbook


Dell entered the netbook market last year with the 8.9-inch Inspiron Mini 9 and has since released a range of increasingly larger models. The Inspiron Mini 10 is its 10.1-inch netbook and strikes a great balance between mobility and usability.

Dell pushes the upper echelons of netbookitude with the Mini 10. It's a little laptop whose Atom processor marks it as a populist ultraportable, but whose 10-inch, wide-format display and HDMI port reveal more aristocratic ambitions.

Dell's popular Mini 10 is the most customizable Netbook we've seen. Adding extras such as a higher-resolution display makes it more useful, but also blurs the price line between Netbooks and mainstream laptops. High-end extras including a higher-resolution screen and HDMI output; very configurable, for a Netbook, including optional mobile broadband.

According to Sprint, the Dell Inspiron Mini 10 features embedded EV-DO Rev. A wireless service to give Sprint customers an expected average upload speeds of 350-500 kbps and download speeds of between 600 kbps and 1.4 mbps. Peak download data rates increase to 3.1 Mbps (from 2.4 Mbps), while peak upload data rates increase to 1.8 Mbps (from 153 kbps), enabling customers to easily take advantage of robust Internet applications and services like wireless VoIP, high-speed video telephone, music on-demand as well as video messaging.

There’s thankfully little wasted space in the keyboard tray, with wide, flat keys going nearly edge-to-edge. Unlike Dell’s earliest 9-inch Netbooks, there are no missing keys or major space compromises, and important keys, such as the Shift, Tab, and Ctrl keys, are relatively full-size. The narrow wrist rest keeps the system from extending out too far and becoming unwieldy, but that requires a long, letterbox-style touch pad, with the mouse buttons integrated directly into the lower left and right corners of the pad. It’s far from our preferred Netbook touch pad, but better than the similar long touch pad with buttons on the far sides found on HP’s Mini 110.



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