Dell retires the Mini 12

By: Pallab Jyotee Hazarika

Dell decided to phase out the 12-inch member from its netbook family.

See the Road-map

First it was the Inspiron Mini 9 a couple of weeks ago, and now the Mini 12 – Dell has decided to stick to less complicated product-line and concentrate more on the commercially well-accepted products like the 10-inch category. The company is slowly removing the product from its shelves, and even it has already disappeared from the Dell’s sites in Australia, UK, Hong Kong and Singapore. It’s still up at Dell US though.

According to a roadmap leaked over a month ago, the Mini 12 will supposedly be replaced by the 11.6-inch category, codenamed Argos. It should have a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels, powered by an Intel CULV processor, up to 2GB of RAM and 160-250GB of hard disk – as reported by portablemonkey.

So that leaves the Mini 10 and the Mini 10v in the market. The Mini 10 comes with a 10.1-inch LCD screen capable of displaying 1024x576 pixels. It is powered by an Atom CPU, 1GB RAM, up to 160GB hard disk space and comes with a 3-cell battery (optional 6-cell), webcam, WiFi, Bluetooth and a card reader. The 92% keyboard is the reason many would like to migrate to the 10-inch from a lower size.

The biggest difference you’ll see between the new Mini 10v (also called Inspiron 1011) and the Mini 10 is the processor. The Mini 10v uses a typical netbook processor in the form of Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz Diamondville, instead of the Z5xx Silverthorne-class found in the original 10-inch Mini.

If portablemonkey is to be believed, a non-compatible and high memory-consuming Vista and a slower HDD went against Mini 12.

The new 11.6-incher should start at about $400.