Review In the 18 months since Asus rocked up with its Eee PC 701 and kicked off the whole netbook malarkey, we’ve seen the number and types of devices that are nominally included in the category expand almost exponentially. As Ms Streisand so appositely noted, it was all so simple then.
Dell’s Inspiron Mini 10v: a true Small, Cheap Computer
Of course, as with small hatchbacks and RAF fighter aircraft, as the breed has developed so it has become larger, heaver, more complex and more expensive. So whither the Small, Cheap Computer? Well, thanks to Dell, it’s alive and well, thank you very much.
Over the last few months, Dell has quietly taken the axe to its UK netbook range. Gone is the Inspiron Mini 9 – which is a shame – and ditto the Mini 12, though that’s less of a shame because it was cursed with a small and slow HDD, and Dell never saw fit to offer it with Linux or an SSD. Read the rest of this entry »
Review With the evolution of the netbook now progressing at such a rate that it would probably make Darwin mutter darkly about wishing the Bible was right, hardly a month, week, day passes without a new sub-species crawling from the primordial ooze.
One of the latest is the Dell Inspiron Mini 12, which – as the more alert of you will suspect – is a 12in screen version of the Inspiron Mini 9. Well, almost – the differences actually run a little deeper than that.
Mainly its a question of storage. While the Mini 9 only came with SSD storage, in either 4, 8 or 16GB flavours, the Mini 12 only comes with an HDD, either 40GB or 80GB, respectively included on the Linux – Ubuntu 8.04 – and Windows XP varieties of the netbook. Read the rest of this entry »
