We’ve been waiting for it and here it is, Dell’s 8.9-inch mini laptop dubbed the “mini-Inspiron” which sadly shares a similar design.  I’m not a fan of the Inspiron design, they’re bulky, fat and ugly, I liked the previous designs better like that of the Inspiron M1710 and earlier E-series models.  Though, the mini-Inspiron looks… okay.

Among other things the mini shares with its bigger brothers is that it will be available in multiple lid colors just like it’s bigger brothers.

As far as specs, there isn’t much but it’s a good guess the display is 8.9-inches of the glossy variety with a resolution of 1280 x 768.  It’s possible that it could use Intel’s Atom processor which should be available by the time it starts shipping to consumers.  Pricing wasn’t discussed but it’s rumored to be below $500.

According to Gizmodo, it has three USB ports, a memory card reader, VGA out, webcam, Ethernet and most likely lid color choices; currently being shown in candy red.

It may even have a choice of either Windows XP or Ubuntu and will come with Dell’s Direct Media (without an optical drive, what’s the point?) and several wireless connectivity options though it will probably include WiFi but may have other options such as 3G connectivity.

I just hope that Dell comes up with a better name than “mini-Inspiron” before the actual release.  Who knows, maybe there will be a “mini-XPS” line at some point.

Related:

Forget the EeePC 900, here’s the 10-inch Atom-based EeePC

Forget the Asus EeePC 901, here’s model 1001

Asus announces EeePC with 9-inch display

Compal to make 8.9-inch laptop for Dell to compete with HP mini-Note

Dell’s Studio PC aims to out-mini the Mac Mini

Entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 9:41 am under Notebook.  Print This Post

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