The Mini 10 starts at £299 but, if you begin to add in the goodies, that figure soon begins to head skyward. For starters, selecting the Z530 1.6GHz chip rather than the 1.33GHz Z520 will cost you an extra £20. The HD screen will set you back another £20, while the built-in TV tuner will cost you a further £30. If you want the 6-cell battery, that will be an extra £45. That all ends up at a grand total of £414.

The more colourful options cost extra

Now that's a lot for a netbook – it would be daft to claim otherwise – but you do get a fair amount of kit for your money. The HDMI slot turns the Mini 10 into a handy front room PC to hook up to you TV – a role helped by the 10's silent fan-less running – while the high resolution screen and TV tuner lets the Mini 10 do things other netbooks can only dream about.

And if you do fancy a netbook with a hi-res screen, the Mini 10 doesn't face much in the way of competition. The Sony Vaio P-Series has a higher resolution display, but is a lot, lot more expensive, while the 1366x768 version of the HP Mini 2140 has yet to make an appearance. So, the Mini 10 currently leads a field of one.

Verdict

The Dell Inspiron Mini 10 is the polar opposite of the 10v. While the latter is designed to be a cheap as possible in the name of robust portable computing, the goal of the 10 proper is to be more a jack of all trades. Like all the current crop of Atom netbooks though, the lack of a decent GPU is an annoyance and, in this case, the HDMI port brings that annoyance into somewhat sharper relief. ®

Bootnote

At some point in the not too distant – but Dell UK isn't saying exactly when, even though buyers in the US can specify it now – the Mini 10 will also be available with a built-in GPS receiver. The US cost is $70 (£43/€50), but it's only an option on machines with the HD screen.

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