The folks at Laptop Magazine have published one of the first detailed reviews of the Dell Inspiron Mini 10. The long and short of it is that this may be one of the most usable netbooks from Dell to date. But if you really want a machine that stands out from the crowd, you might want to wait until Dell offers upgrade options including a higher capacity battery, a higher resolution display, and an integrated TV tuner.
The keyboard looks pretty good, and Laptop Mag reports that it’s actually slightly larger than the keyboard on the Inspiron Mini 12, which has a 12 inch display. But in order to save space, Dell took the unusual step up integrating the mouse buttons directly in the touchpad, which takes a bit of getting used to.
The Inspiron Mini 10 also uses an Intel Atom Z530 CPU with integrated GMA 500 graphics. The combo isn’t quite strong enough to handle 720p WMV playback which makes the computer’s built in HDMI port kind of funny. It’ll be interesting to see if Dell offers improved graphics and video capabilities when the company begins offering a version of this laptop with a 1366 x 768 pixel display instead of the 1024 x 576 pixel screen that’s available today.
You can read more about the Dell Inspiron Mini 10 in the Liliputing Product Database.
One of the things I’ve found helpful when dealing with underpowered netbook graphics & HD video is using the CoreAVC h.264 codec. This is a pay codec ($8/$15), but it lets your netbook do higher definition h.264 video.
Hulu, for example, uses h.264. So do most of the .mkv files that you find anime encoded in.
https://www.coreavc.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=category§ionid=4&id=21&Itemid=59