You may have seen some recent reports from places like Engadget, liliputing and Electronista that the Inspiron Mini 12 was going away. It’s true. Dell recently decided that it’s time for the Mini 12 to ride off into the sunset.
Here’s a nice Mini 12 photo comparing it to an Inspiron 1420 (thanks Watchcaddy from Flickr!)
So, should you read anything into this as far as Dell’s commitment to the netbook space? Nope. It really boils down to this: for a lot of customers, 10-inch displays are the sweet spot for netbooks. That’s why we offer two different 10-inch Inspiron netbooks for Mini 10 and the Mini 10v. And on the Latitude side, the Latitude 2100 netbook is finding a home in schools all over the place. Portability is one of the key points for netbook customers. Larger notebooks require a little more horsepower to be really useful. More to come from Dell on that later.
Update: I saw Arrington's post in TechCrunch questioning my horsepower statement above. I meant that customers who buy a 12-inch system expect a little more horsepower.
But back to the subject of netbooks.The Inspiron Mini 9 is available again on Dell.com for the time being. I tried to reach the Mini 9 to see how long she’d be around, but she wasn’t available for comment like she was last time.
Bottom line, if you’re a customer in the United States who wants a brand new Mini 9, you can order it from this link. Also, both the Mini 9 and Mini 12 are still available for US customers through @DellOutlet. Click on the respective product links to see what configurations we’ve got on hand.