Acer Review, Asus Review – Netbook 10

There’s something about Dell netbooks that make me smile. They’re always so well designed, streamlined and sheek. It’s no surprise then that the new 11.6″ Dell 11z laptop-netbook looks fantastic. It also comes with pretty sweet specs, making it easily deemed both as laptop and netbook. The price is a little iffy at $450 – yes it’s budget-friendly, but you will NEED to upgrade the battery & OS to Windows 7 eventually.

[Rating:6/7]

Dell 11z Features & Drawbacks

• Celeron processor - Beginning to see a trend with the 12″ netbooks straying from Intel Atom processors. Samsung’s 12″ X120 is sporting a dual core Pentium, Acer’s Aspire 1410 has a 1.4GHz Intel ULV SU3500 and the MSI Wind U210 has a 1.6Ghz Athlon Neo MV-40.

  Back to the Celeron – it’s a 1.20GHz ultra low voltage processor and comes with a pretty sweet bus speed of 800MHz. The 1.2GHz threw me off, seeing as the Aton N270 has a CPU speed of 1.6GHz – but Dell claims the Celeron improves productivity by and amazing 40% and CPU performance by an also-impressive 39%. Reviews also say Vista runs smoothly on the ULV processor. If you upgrade to Windows 7 next month, you’ll probably find it runs even better.

• Really thin – yes this is worth mentioning. The Inspiron 11z measures only 1.02″ at it’s ‘thickest’! It’s also really light at 3lbs. This of course will change when you realize you desperately need a clunky 6 cell battery for life to work out. Until the 6 cell is available though, you’ll have the comfort of knowing you battery-lacking netbook looks great.

• Coming soon: 500GB HDD – Dell says they have a 500 GB HDD on its way. Think about how sweet it would be to update the 11z to that! As long as you have everything backed up, you really shouldn’t need an external storage device when this comes out!

• Also coming soon: 6 cell battery providing 6 hour battery life (geez, finally), optional bluetooth, and optional mobile broadband. Good to know Dell will be nurturing this model. Then again, Dell did just axe the Mini 12 from US & UK stores (not sure which other ones, but the Mini 12 is still available in the Indian store).

• Touchpad Issues – Before I get into this, check out the touch pad. Isn’t she a beauty! She can take a while of getting used to and configuring options, but should work fine thereafter. She also supports multi-touch. Oh yeah.

Rating – 6/7

• Value for Money  -0.5 (battery battery battery)
• Speed and Performance –1
• Screen -1
• Keyboard – 1
• Portability & Battery Life – 0.5
• Looks and Design –1
• Extensibility & connectivity –1

Bottomline

It’s a Dell, it’s practically a no brainer. The netbook looks great. It’ll work great for low powered processing. If you want something more powerful, you can pay up and upgrade the RAM to 4GB (yay benefits of not being a ‘netbook’ per se! you get to by pass Microsoft’s whiny restrictions!), and upgrade to Windows 7 next month. If you want a device that lasts longer, you can get the Asus 1101 HA for $420, 11 hours of battery but only 1GB RAM and 160GB of storage. At the end of the day, it really comes down to which netbook feels more ‘right.’

I would advise you to buy the netbook after a month. Dell needs to work out a couple of kinks (read the reviews the 11z is getting), and the netbook sounds like it could use a little work before it becomes a great! buy.

Dell 11z Product Page

Dell 11z Specs

Processor – 1.2GHz Intel Celeron 723


Chipset – Intel GS45

OS – Windows Vista

Memory – 2GB RAM

Storage – 250GB HDD

Display –11.6″ 1366 x 768

Connectivity – 802.11a/b/g

Ports –  3 x USB, 3-in-1 card reader, HDMI

Battery –  3 cell

Dimensions –  11.5″ x 8.43″ x 0.92″ – 1.02″

Weight – 3.05lbs (with 3 cell battery)

Related posts:

1. Dell Inspiron 11Z Now Official, Now Out
2. Dell Mini 9 Inspiron 910, 9″ Netbook Review
3. Dell Inspiron 11Z Price Hike? Now $499
4. Dell Inspiron Mini 10 With 2G RAM, Vista Now Available
5. Dell Inspiron Mini Nickelodeon Edition

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