Dell launched new subnotebook: Inspiron Mini 12

On Sunday, the Dell Inspiron Mini 12, a larger version of the Mini 9, makes its debut—in Japan. Dell had reached an exclusive agreement with VIC Camera, Kojima, and SofMap—all Japanese retailers—to make the early announcement overseas. According to Dell, the Inspiron 12 will ship in the United States by mid-November. The Mini 12 is officially the first netbook to house a 12-inch widescreen; the largest so far have been 10-inch models such as the Lenovo IdeaPad S10 and the MSI Wind. The screen offers 1,280-by-800 resolution, higher than the typical 1,280-by-600 netbooks. Its shape is like a wedge, measuring 9.0-by-11.8-by-0.92 inches, becoming thicker towards the back. The weight starts at 2.7 pounds, with a 3-cell battery. A 6-cell battery will be available later on and will likely bring the weight over 3 pounds.
Like the S10 and the Wind, the Mini 12’s feature set includes three USB ports, a multicard reader, Ethernet, VGA-Out, and a 1.3-megapixel camera. Hard drives aren’t the meager solid state ones offered on the Mini 9; you have a choice of 40GB, 60GB, and 80GB spinning drives. Although it doesn’t have the antenna infrastructure to support WWAN, an empty slot is available for it, like on the Mini 9. In the meantime, the Mini 12 has both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth built in. Like the Mini 9, the new Mini uses Intel’s Atom platform: The 1.33-GHz Z520 and the 1.6-GHz Z530 Atom processor are both available come November. The Mini 12 is one of the few systems to run Windows Vista Basic, which will be the only choice for operating systems at this time. The Vista system starts at $550.
Source: Computer World