I’ve tested a few netebooks now, and I’ve found that the challenge tends to be balancing form and design with performance. With the Inspiron Mini 10, Dell has definitely delivered on the form and design side, but I found the performance to be limiting and challenging at times.
On the positive side, I really liked the Mini’s design. My model was a glossy black, and it’s a good-looking netebook. It’s light, at a shade under three pounds, and its dimensions make it easily portable. I liked the all glass display panel, and 10” is about the right size for a netbook. I do wish netbooks would use all of the display panel rather than leaving a border, but they do need space for the integrated Web cam.
The Mini 10 boasts a 92-per-cent keyboard, and the typing experience was the best of the various netbooks I’ve used. There’s always an adjustment with a new device, but with this one it was short and my typing was quickly back up to speed. Below the keyboard is the mouse trackpad, which integrates the left/right click buttons into the trackpad. This is great to save space, but I found the finger contortions awkward, and it was difficult to scroll pages without jumping around, so I plugged-in a USB mouse instead.
Port-wise, the Mini 10 is well equipped. It offers an HDMI-out port in place of VGA-out, allowing better image quality if you have compatible display equipment. There’s one USB port and the power-in port on the left side, and on the right-side there’s two more USB ports, as well as a LAN port, the HDMI port, and mic and headphone jacks. The sound quality of the internal speakers was nothing to write home about.
My experience was less positive on the performance front. My machine was running Windows XP with an Intel Atom Processor (Z520 1.33GHz) with 1 GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive and an IntelGraphics Media Accelerator. This is the entry-level configuration. You can upgrade to a 1.66GHz processor for $40, which I’d recommend, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem that you can upgrade the RAM when ordering online.
That’s unfortunate, because another gig of RAM might have made a big difference. While I was impressed with the boot-up speed, otherwise performance was less than ideal. Getting out of standby-mode was a regular challenge. Often it just wouldn’t come back and I’d have to pull the battery and re-boot; other times it would lag greatly.
Running multiple applications, or even multiple Web browser tabs, could degrade system performance or freeze the notebook.
I know that netbook functionality isn’t going to be at the same as a notebook, but still, I expected more from the Mini 10. A little more RAM might have made the difference. I also wasn’t overly impressed with battery performance, managing barely two hours while running WiFi with the brightness turned down.
Overall, I’d consider Dell’s Mini 10 a very well-designed but underpowered netbook. Starting at $429 its reasonably priced for basic mobile functionality, but just a tad more horsepower is necessary.