What do you do when the Dell Mini 9 [Product page] and Mini 12 just aren’t enough? Well the only logical thing to do is come out with the Mini 10. The Dell Mini 10, shown at CES, has (obviously enough) a 10″ screen. Something that immediately piques my interested is that the Mini 10 apparently won’t run the obligatory 1024×600 resolution, but instead use a properly formatted 16:9 aspect ratio screen with a 720p resolution (1280×720). Some other nice features include:
- Z530 Atom CPU (less typical than most netbooks)
- 802.11N WiFi
- Integrated GPS
- Integrated 3G
- TV-tuner
- A trackpad with what Dell is calling “exclusive gestures”
I have to say that this is shaping up to be a nice 10″ netbook. We’ll see how the pricing turns out, which at this point is not announced by Dell, nor a release date.
[Engadget]
im curious to see what the battery life will be like, if this is another 3hr stinker, no thanks!
And the graphics chipset. What is dell using for this?
So hard to Google, apparently. There’s currently only one available chipset for the Z Atoms, and that’s the Intel US15L chipset with GMA 500 graphics.
Moderator: Thank you for deleting those two, um… salacious posts. I’ve never had an identity stolen like that before. I have to say its a little disturbing.
In any case, my original question was borderline sarcasm: It was intended to point out the lack of choice in video. I’ll be less subtle, as long as you’ll consider being a bit more gentle: I’d like to see an ION based netbook.
Regards,
Hans (The real one).
Childish trolling aside, I do admit an error: the US15L is one of *two* chipsets available for the Z Atoms. There is also the US15W chipset. Functionality-wise, they appear to be identical.
Sob… :(
All these CES product announcements and none with the Pixel Qi screens that their site says that some manufacturers will be using. They do say that these new power saving screens (extending battery by 5 fold) will be on products that we will see in Q1 or was it Q2 of 2009?
Quotes as follows from:
http://www.pixelqi.com
“Pixel Qi screens can increase battery life between charges by 5-fold, and, in addition, the readability and legibility of these new screens decrease the need for paper and printing due to their paper-white ultra-high-resolution mode. These screens also sport excellent color, contrast and field-of-view for multi-media use”.
“The screens will be available for mainstream laptops, mini-laptops and ebook readers in high volume mass production in mid-2009”.
Sure wish that we get a netbook with at least 10 hours battery run times, running LINUX out of the box. The sooner the better.
For more on Pixel Qi’s directions to save energy and power see the Pixel Qi Press pages on their site (the very short video interviews done by Big Think are an education by themselves).
Increasing battery life by a factor of 5 would be awesome, but don’t read too deeply into that marketing mumbo. About 50% of the power from a laptop is consumed by the screen. So unless their screens somehow reduce the power consumption of other parts of the computer, then the best they could do is decrease the power consumption of the screen to 1/5 of what most are today.
most 10″ Atom LED netbooks use between 10w – 15w total (depending on current, CPU usage, HDD usage, brightness, wireless)
the screen at max brightness is only 3w of that, so the increase in battery life wont be anywhere even close to 5-fold (at least in netbooks)
it could be that we will see a version using a nvidia chipset at some point in the future:
http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=11323&Itemid=65
maybe a better link:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/12/nvidia-ion-platform-gets-demonstrated-at-ces/
Funny that nobody mentioned the KEYBOARD! Will it have a keyboard that is useful unlike the Mini 9? I have a Mini 9 and found that once you get use to it, you have problems typing on other keyboards. So I went out and purchased a HP Mini Note with an almost normal sized keyboard and a 10″ screen. I’ve been using it for my main computer ever since! A 10″ screen is perfect for maintaining portability and still use it browsing the web and about anything else you want to do. So I believe that if Dell has fixed the “keyboard problem”, that it would be worth getting. Right now I’m very happy with my HP Mini Note and the Dell Mini 9 just sits on the shelve until I go to town where its longer battery life is useful.
//bob
I have to say the same thing. I also got a mini9, got tired of the crummy keyboard, and now have a hp 1000. If you can’t use the keyboard, all the pretty bells and whistles in the world wont help, I don’t think.
Dell have confirmed the release date to be February 27th.
More details on my blog at http://www.paulsynnott.com/blog/2009/02/09/dell-mini-10-release-date-confirmed/
DO NOT order the Mini10…Dell has a huge shortage on these netbooks and I have been waiting over 40 days for it….terrible Customer Service. I ordered on May 11th and I still have not received mine yet….Dell.com shows estimated delivery date of 6/30/09