I have recently acquired a Dell Inspiron Mini 10, a small, stripped-down laptop (a.k.a. netbook, sub-notebook) with limited performance -- at least when compared to modern full-sized laptops or desktops -- but excellent mobility characteristics. What follows is a review.Firstly, some details on what I actually got:
- Inspiron 1010, Intel Atom Processor Z530, 1.6GHz, 533MHzFSB, 512K L2 Cache, Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 500, 1GB RAM.
- 10.1 Inch High Definition Widescreen Display (1366x768)*
- Connectivity: ethernet, 802.11 g/n, Bluetooth.
- 160GB, 2.5inch, 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive.
- 56WHr Lithium-Ion Battery (6-cell).
- OS: Linux Ubuntu 8.04
- Price tag (including shipping and after a 10% discount coupon): $420.26
The processor
I stopped following processor technology roughly around 2002, a little after I left academia for a software development job. I still find the technology interesting, and am amused by how processor clock speeds have basically stagnated since then, and SMP became the rule, kinda (under the guise of multicore chips). I can't help but think this a cheat to keep up with Moore's law: each single processor or core hasn't really doubled in speed in the last every few 18-month cycles, but we throw more of them in a die so the number of cycles available should make up for it, right? I don't know. It used to be friggin' hard to get any piece of multi-threaded code doing anything remotely useful to scale linearly back in 2001, and I suspect it can't have gotten that much easier today. A quick search on Atom reveals that this is a 64bit x86 with power efficiency front and center. So my 1.6 GHz x86 64bit portable should be roughly equivalent in performance to whatever I was running sometime in 2001-2, except I'll be using less than 200 A of current and won't need a giant fan blasting noisily on top of an equally large heat sink, and the rig shouldn't heat up a small room.
[Edit: Actually, the Atom Z530 (Silverthorne) in this mini is a 32bit architecture. Atom's next iteration (Diamondville) will reportedly be a 64bit instruction set.]
The OS
The mini 10 can be acquired with a Dell-installed Linux, which saves you $50 on the MS Windows XP version. Given the likely usage pattern on a device such as this (internet browsing, email reading, maybe some multimedia handling), going the Linux route is a no-brainer, and it's what I chose.
As its Linux distribution, Dell opted to use Canonical's Ubuntu "Hardy Heron" (following that company's tradition of having their releases christened by bubbly "artistic-creative" wii-playing twentysomethings that probably think they're hard-core hackers because they can run apt-get on the command line and can use vi without crying too much (but they call it vim)). Published in April 2008 it isn't the latest Ubuntu, but it is their current LTS (Long Term Support) release, and it's guaranteed to be maintained and updated through 2011. Their release-naming department not-withstanding, this seems to be a rock-solid OS platform (Ubuntu is a Debian Linux derivative, so this isn't a surprise), and Dell did a very good job adapting Ubuntu to its product: Everything works as it would on Win XP, including the keyboard special keys, the screen-embedded webcam, proprietary sound/video codecs, etc.
On the usability front, Dell chose to ship a custom desktop interface that's actually not bad, and hides the Gnome desktop that long-time Linux users will be familiar with and is standard with Ubuntu. If you don't like the "smart phone style" interface, you can easily revert back to the standard Gnome desktop from one of the main menus.
Battery life, ergonomics
I ordered the largest battery offered by Dell for this model, and which is claimed to last for as long as 8 hours. I've had it on and off throughout the day today, disconnected from its power supply, and my battery indicator still seems to think I have about 30 minutes of power left. This kind of performance is entirely satisfactory to me, so I'll leave it at that.
Ergonomics on the mini 10 sucks, no other way to put it. The finger pad is at the very edge of the keyboard area, so my hand hangs at a higher angle than is really comfortable. The battery shape, jutting out on the bottom, turns it into a rear stand (as part of the design), giving the keyboard a forward slant that I personally dislike (I'd prefer a flat-laying keyboard). The keyboard feel, on the other hand, is great, and it makes it quite pleasurable to type on. For a machine this size, the keys are actually quite large, and no smaller than on my other two keyboards within line-of-sight as I type this.
So, does it cut it?
In short, yes, it does. It plays streaming media (although online videos skip frames like crazy). It can run firefox with a dozen tabs open (which is more than you'll probably run on a screen this size). Google Earth 5 ran competently (it was choppy when the maps move, but otherwise very usable). I don't expect it will play any half-modern games (I didn't even try), but other than that, everything else just runs. OpenOffice starts up reasonably fast (I don't perceive it to be any slower than on my desktop). All of the system utilities (kismet, wireshark, gpg, the Ubuntu package manager software) I experimented with are handled as well as they would anywhere else.
The use I have in mind for this system is as part of a mobile amateur radio digital transmission platform, and I doubt any of the software I'll use would pose a computational challenge to any processors released after 1998 -- though I have yet to try running the software modem layer I'll need, and am not quite sure as to what to expect there; given that software modem drivers have been around for more than a decade, I have reason to believe the mini 10 will handle them fine. So the final verdict is that, yes, it should cut it for what I intend to use it, and I'm very happy with what I've seen of the mini 10 so far.
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