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The cheap ultra-portable Netbook computer may well be a hardy and tempting little tyke during these times of recession, but evidently it’s not immune to the market pressures being shouldered by its notebook brethren.
Be gone, fatty! Image: pittaya/Flickr.
Specifically, heavyweight computer manufacturer Dell Inc. has this week pulled the production plug on its 12-inch Mini platform because the pocket-friendly device is supposedly a tad too big to truly qualify as a Netbook.
“It really boils down to this: for a lot of customers, 10-inch displays are the sweet spot for netbooks,” explained Dell’s chief blogger Lionel Menchaca in an official post.
“Portability is one of the key points for netbook customers,” he added. “Larger notebooks require a little more horsepower to be really useful. More to come from Dell on that later.”
In order to fill the gap left by the Mini 12’s departure and help maintain Dell’s presence in the Netbook sector, the company has said it is temporarily resurrecting the Mini 9 – which was similarly “retired” from Dell’s product portfolio in early June of this year.
The Mini 9’s distinctly Netbook features return attached to an accompanying price tag of $299 USD. Those prospective computer buyers curious to straddle the blurry line between Netbook and notebook can still secure the Mini 12 through Dell’s factory outlet, where it costs around $570 USD.
The Mini 9 comes with a backlit 8.9-inch LCD screen (1024 x 600), a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, up to 1GB of DDR2 (533MHz), up to 16GBs of SSD storage (on the Windows XP model) and up to 32GBs of SSD storage (on the Ubuntu Linux model), and Intel’s Integrated Graphic Media Accelerator 950.
Other features include a trio of USB ports, integrated 10/100 LAN, Wi-Fi (802.11g), Bluetooth, a 3-in-1 media card reader, VGA video, a 4-cell lithium ion battery, and an optional Web cam.
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