
The Dell Inspiron Mini 10 is already one of the most customizable netbooks on the market. It comes with options including a built in TV tuner, GPS receiver, and HD 1366 x 768 pixel display. Now Dell is offering customers the choice of configuring the netbook with 2GB of RAM.
Of course, it doesn’t qualify for a low cost Windows XP license once you slap more than 1GB of RAM in there, so you’ll have to configure the netbook with Windows Vista Home Basic. Or you could just buy a model with 1GB of RAM and Windows XP and upgrade it yourself. Update: Apparently that’s not an option with the Dell Mini 10, since the RAM is soldered to the motherboard.
The base price fo the Vista/2GB version is $429, so you could probably save a few bucks by doing a home upgrade anyway.
Hopefully Dell will also offer an option to configure the Mini 10 with 2GB of RAM and Ubuntu Linux in the future, which should help keep the price down. For now, the Vista/2GB model is only available in the US.
via Direct2Dell
As usual, they gouge you on the upgrades ($25 for wireless n, $20 for bluetooth, $35 for upgrading the battery), but this is rounding into a pretty nice system, with 2GB RAM, up to a 250 GB HDD, choice of hi res or low res screens, 3 different flavors of 3G (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint), and up to 3 years of accidental damage coverage.
When they get the choice of OSs up and running (and can sell 7 instead of Vista on the 2GB version) and start offering discounted packages that roll up a lot of the spendy add-ons, this will be about as loaded as netbooks get.
The Microsoft rules and all that — no XP = Vista.
What surprises me is that they didn’t have Ubuntu ready at launch. I guess however they got 2 GB units working, it required some OS integration work. Hopefully Ubuntu will be along soon.
BTW, can anyone figure out whether this is a new memory-upgradeable rev of the motherboard, or did they just start surface-mounting 2GB as well as 1GB?
Vista? Really, no kidding, Vista???
as far as i was aware the dell mini 10 has the ram and cpu on the same mini pcb with no provission for extra ram… see here https://gadgetmix.com/index/dell-mini-gets-dissected/