“Oooooo, pretty!”
That’s usually the first reaction I get whenever I show Dell’ new Inspiron Mini 12 to someone. My favorite reaction was watching my husband and daughter go back and forth between the Mini 9 and the Mini 12 trying to decide which was their “favorite” when I brought them both home for one night recently.
Today or tomorrow (depending are where you are) we expand our “Mini” family with the Inspiron Mini 12. It is debuting exclusively in Japan, and a limited number will appear this week on the shelves of several retail stores there – including Bic Camera, Kojima and Sofmap. We expect the Mini 12 to be available worldwide on dell.com by the end of November with a starting price under $600.
When looking at the Mini 9 and the Mini 12, each of course, has their strong points. Each is small, thin, light (less than 3 lbs.) and easy on the shoulder in terms of schlepability. And both were purpose-designed for on-the-go connectivity. The Mini 12 obviously has a bigger “footprint” than the Mini 9 – but the extra space is put to good use, with a bigger keyboard and bigger screen (12-inch vs. 9-inch), and bigger hard drives (40,60, 80GB).
Like the Mini 9, the Mini 12 was designed with burst activities in mind. The device is powered by another of Intel’s Atom processors – the one known as Silverthorne – so it gets great battery life (our lab is benchmarking approximately 3.5 hours 3 hours with the 3-cell battery, more than 7 hours and about 6 hours with the optional 6-cell battery). It’s great to carry for the day, jumping online, checking email, uploading pictures, and surfing the net, or connecting to your primary PC via Dell Remote Access.
Update: My original battery times were based on early testing information. See the strikethrough details in the previous paragraph for updated details. My apologies for the oversight.
When I recently showed off the Minis to my co-workers , I compared them to Mini Coopers (I may be setting myself up for some schooling by the auto enthusiast crowd here). They are cute, they are great for buzzing around town in, but they are not designed to tow a trailer. The Mini 9 and 12 are similar – use them all day long to get around and stay in touch, but use your primary desktop or laptop to do the heavy lifting like multitasking (e.g. having multiple applications open at the same time), picture and video editing, file conversions, database manipulation, or, of course, high end gaming.
When the Mini 12 does become available on dell.com, it will likely be with Windows Vista first, with the Dell customized interface version of Ubuntu following by the end of the year. It comes with a built-in Webcam (with Dell Video Chat), Blutooth, and Wi-Fi standard. And let’s set the record straight now regarding WWAN – like the Mini 9, the Mini 12 is not “mobile broadband” ready today. Stay tuned, however, as we a working as quickly as possible to make that happen (it’s like herding cats as I understand it/ It involves extensive testing and qualification by several different folks including the FCC, the wireless carriers, and our own wireless and engineering teams). For those who want a Mini and mobile broadband today – I recommend you look at any of the USB solutions from wireless carriers.
Since the Mini 12 isn’t available here yet, we haven’t sent any out for review, but we expect to in the next week or so. In the meantime, Lionel’s Direct2Dell post has gathered links to a few online stories about the Mini 12.
October 27th, 2008 at 9:03 am
[…] PC industry. Intel noted the same trends. Now here comes Dell with its Inspiron Mini 12 (Techmeme, Dell blog). It’s not quite a netbook–it has Vista and the usual hard drive–but it’s cheap at $600 or so. […]
October 27th, 2008 at 9:05 am
Things I’d like to do before it’s really out there:
Get my hands on one of the mini 12s and take it for a test ride, so to speak.
Particularly with the oft ignored Ubuntu Linux.
Although, no internal Sprint WWAN availability kind of shoots me in the leg, knowing that it *is* being tested tells me that the motherboard at least has a spot for me in the near (we hope) future.
October 27th, 2008 at 9:37 am
@ Justin - to clarify there are two (or three in the case of AT&T) parts to supporting “built-in” WWAN. Part 1: the built-in antenna - usally hidden in the LCD back. Until we idetify a unit as WWAN ready, it won’t have this antenna infrastructure. We do this as more units go out the door without WWAN than not, so why make all those non-WWAN users pay for a feature they don’t need/use? Part 2: the radio — to your point this is usally a mini-PCI card that goes into a slot on the mothbaord –with connections to the afore mentioned, all important, antenna. Part 3: AT&T will still need a SIM card. while Sprint and Verizon Wireless do not.
October 27th, 2008 at 10:32 am
[…] - Dell Inspiron Mini 12 Gallery - Direct2Dell - Dell - Your blog - APC Review - LAPTOP Magazine - Q&A - LAPTOP Magazine - First […]
October 27th, 2008 at 10:41 am
I had an X200 for a number of years, and it was fabulous in terms of portability yet had decent performance and (at the time) acceptable battery life. When it finally died, I was saddened to see that nobody had anything comparable. It’s nice to see that Dell is finally coming out with a device that fills this hole in the lineup.
October 27th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Dell should work with http://www.miniusa.com to come-up with a custom Inspiron Mini 9 & 12 adapters …its will be a cool promotion Advt as well as break the apple influence with younger generation
October 31st, 2008 at 9:16 am
[…] minimum of 8.9, but 10” is becoming widely available, and when Dell recently announced their Inspiron Mini 12, ZDNet’s Larry Dignan rightfully noted that the netbook-notebook-laptop lines have just […]
November 3rd, 2008 at 7:59 am
[…] is a minimum of 8.9, but 10” is becoming widely available, and when Dell recently announced their Inspiron Mini 12, ZDNet’s Larry Dignan rightfully noted that the netbook-notebook-laptop lines have just become […]
December 27th, 2008 at 9:36 am
One PR Pro to another: Dell needs to seriously investigate its customer care situation. Check out, http://www.consumeraffairs.com/computers/dell_svc.html. I’ve got my own story I’d love to share with you. A true PR professional should be very concerned about how your company’s brand and reputation are being tarnished. Please, I’d welcome the chance to discuss how frustrating it can be to be a dell customer with you.