Dell Mini 12
Good Points:
- great screen
- slim, lightweight
- ships with Ubuntu pre-installed; everything works
- boots and works fully with Ubuntu 9.04 out of the box
- relatively inexpensive for a 12″ laptop
Bad Points:
- lousy keyboard: bad keyboard pitch, bad placement of “/” and “\” keys
- although it ships with a full version of Ubuntu 8.04, it doesn’t point at the standard repositories, so the only way to upgrade it is to reinstall from scratch (and you can’t install 8.10)
- bad battery life (less than 2h with the standard battery)
- fairly slow (slower than an ASUS EEE 1000 or an HP 2133)
- the default desktop attempts to run every application maximized, which doesn’t make sense on such a large screen (fortunately, it’s easy to disable)
Altogether, the Dell Mini 12 is not a bad netbook, and it’s the only one in its class with a 12″ screen.
But Dell kind of screwed up the design, in particular the keyboard.
