‘What’s in a name?’ is not the question with which Intel and Psion dismissed the wars over the term ‘netbook’, whatever anyone else might say. That was a line Shakespeare used in his tragedy, Romeo and Juliet. The point is that once the issues over trademark had blown over, manufacturers lost no time in building mini-laptops and attempting to popularize them under the netbook class. While these devices may not be capable of serving as mainstream PCs, they are useful for computing tasks that don’t fall under the hardcore usage category. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that the netbook started taking fair-sized bites out of the notebook’s market shares and seemed to come into its own. The latest netbook we laid hands on for reviewing purposes was the Dell Inspiron Mini 1012 which packs itself into a neat black and white chassis. It looked like a well-behaved device from the outside, but what we were more interested in was its innards.
Call it jumping to conclusions, but the netbook fooled us into thinking that its lid opens and closes to a biometric system that accepts a finger pressed onto any part of it. The problem with glossy finishes is that they tend to exaggerate the amount of grease that a fingerprint could possibly leave on a surface. The shiny silver Dell logo on the exterior offers some relief to the black lid and white base that could look a conservative color scheme to some people. We found that the device’s lid opens steadily in a hinge-forward design which Dell has been using on a number of their newer laptops including the Inspiron 14R that we reviewed previously. The deck area around the touchpad and keyboard has a slightly raised crosshatch pattern, while the completely customizable touchpad is not expansive enough to let anyone navigate the web or the various applications comfortably. The left and right click buttons that flow smoothly out of the touchpad’s base can be made out by the small rod-like marks indicating each. Though the functions assigned to the touchpad and the mouse buttons can be adjusted easily, the settings are hurriedly applied before you get down to ‘OK’aying them. The keyboard feels very undersized beneath fingers that ought not to be oversized for the bouncy keys which should have been raised by at least a millimeter or two for contented touch-typing.
This petite Inspiron starts up quickly to reveal a useful search box on the task bar for finding content stored on the PC or looking up stuff on the internet as well as the customizable Dell Dock featuring easy access to several applications. The 10.5†x 7.7†x 1.3†chassis’ right side comes fitted with ports for the network cable, headphones, microphone and USB 2.0. The left edge hosts a VGA connector, two USB 2.0 ports, a 3-in-1 media card reader and an optional antenna in terminal. You can charge up the netbook through the power terminal placed at its rear end. The device’s base area shows off the air cooling vent that look misplaced and two speakers near the front lip. Overall, it feels sturdy in the hands albeit somewhat heavy for a netbook at 3.1 pounds. The audio is supported by the Realtek HD Audio Manager apart from the small openings for speakers that muffle sound emanating from them at the slightest provocation, including us placing the netbook on a faintly cushy surface like our laps. We’d advice you to employ a pair of headphones for listening to music or watching movies instead as well as cooling pads for the delicate skin area on the lap. At the same time, you’re not going to get powerful bass even through the headsets on this gizmo. We expect that the 160GB of hard disk space that’s provided with it may fall short for those who are all for entertainment on the go. Plus, there’s no HDMI output option for hooking up the netbook to the home HDTV.
The Dell Mini 10 comes pre-loaded with the older version of Flash; so we had to install Flash Player 10 before viewing videos over the internet. The default browser and search engine are Internet Explorer and Bing, respectively. The 10.1†screen lets you adjust the color quality, refresh rate as well as the screen resolution up to 1024 x 600p. If this piece of information is likely to help anyone, the homescreen may also be rotated between 0° to 270°. While it’s no fun to watch stuff with special effects on this modest-sized display, the visuals are as crisp as you can expect with the integrated Intel GMA driver for mobile. The netbook is a bit of a laggard at connecting to web pages and switching between tabs. When three or four web pages are opened simultaneously, it takes two impatient foot taps spaced a second apart before the PC registers the fact that we want to switch between tabs in a rather surprised manner. A 4.04 minute YouTube video (Guilty by The Rasmus, if you want to know) took 5 minutes to finish buffering over a Wi-Fi network at 480p resolutions. There’s a tiny amount of lag while accessing applications offline too. The overall performance is helped along by less than 1GB of RAM and the 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 processor.
It’s the Windows XP Home Edition SP3 that comes with the Mini 10 besides reinstallation CDs for the OS, Dell Webcam Central, utilities and drivers as also a Microsoft Works 9.0 CD. The portability factor is volubly apparent since this netbook’s battery takes around two hours to juice up to full capacity though it drains away much more slowly than that. Time spent with this netbook lets us chalk up the battery run time to 5 hours at a minimum taking average usage into account. You won’t have to wile away time with your back to a laboriously discovered wall socket so that no else claims it before you do when stranded away from home with this gadget. The cooling vents that open up at the base are clearly inefficient at maintaining the system temperature. It nearly set our desk on fire after sitting stationary on the same spot while charging up. We don’t get the logic behind putting the vents exactly where they’re most likely to fail so spectacularly at their job. Why not bring it to the front, sides or back? The company extends a prepaid DataSafe account for a year that supplies 2GB of online storage for remote sharing of content across compatible devices. Lastly, the 1.3MP webcam on the top end of the bezel has the inevitable fun effects and avatars for video chatting at 640 x 480p or clicking 1280 x 1024p pictures.
The Dell Inspiron Mini 1012 netbook costs Rs. 15,000, a price tag that’s in line with most other devices in its category which are currently available in the technology market. It’s an 8 out of 10 rating we’re giving the Dell Inspiron Mini 10 for offering us the typical performance that we’d expect from a regular netbook.
