Dell Inspiron Mini 12 First Impressions

It looks like Dell has been busy and they’re starting to get their new 12″ netbook. the Dell Inspiron Mini 12 netbook out to reviewers. Of course, I don’t rate high enough on the list to get one, but I’m happy to tell you what others have been saying about the Mini 12.We all know that Dell hit a home run when it comes to the overall thinness of their new netbook. It’s not quite MacBook Air-thin, but it’s pretty damn close. Of course, the rest of the overall design doesn’t come anywhere near what Apple does (an aside: is there any other computer manufacturer that puts as much thought and effort into the overall aesthetic that Apple does? How about manufacturer, period? Mercedes? BMW?), but it’s still pretty remarkable when consider the low price. If I hadn’t already made plans on getting something else, I might still consider one of these, performance issues aside.

It appears that’s where there’s problems, but I wonder if that’s because of two limitations. It apparently takes the Dell Inspiron Mini 12 netbook a good two minutes to boot, but you have to consider that it’s booting Vista Home Basic (ugh) and that it has little memory. A Mini 12 outfitted with 1 gig of ram hits the desktop in 2 minutes, while it’s still a couple more away from being usable. Weighed against the ~20 seconds from my Acer Aspire One (AOA110-1722) Netbook review, that’s insufferable. Of course, the One was also booting a pretty stripped down linux, not Vista.

Performance questions aside, the display seems to be warmly received because of its resolution and the keyboard also seems adequate. However, they echoed my thoughts: why didn’t Dell extend the keyboard to the edges of the netbook? The MSI Wind netbook, for example, takes the keyboard to within a millimeter or two of the casing, but Dell wasted a good half an inch on either side here. I still insist it has to do with readily available keyboards to slap in there (i.e. they’d have to do a custom sized 96% (or whatever) keyboard and it’d cost them more).

I’m interested to see the full review and waiting for someone to put XP or linux or OS X on the Dell Inspiron Mini 12 netbook and see how it does. It certainly can’t be any worse than Vista, and I say that as a general supporter of Vista (not Home Basic), but not on a netbook.

Read more about the Dell Inspiron Mini 12 at LaptopMag.