Marvellous. Another one to steer clear of then, although the screen resolution is a welcome improvement.

Can the 1GB ram this comes with be upped to 2GB later on? I read on the net there's no ram slot, the 1GB ram is soldered on. Is this still true?

It's worth pointing out that there IS NO linux driver for the GMA500 card in this machine, so you will not be able to set a decent resolution under linux.

The 1gb of ram you recieve is soldered to the motherboard, so don't think you'll be upgrading later.

Were it not twice the price of the mini 9 that i snapped up recently, i'd be very tempted.

The resolution has been an issue, but the intel driver does allow you to scale all windows to the screen res so it is not an entirely terrible compromise.

I picked one of these up at the last minute before an extended spell abroad. It functions as my home computer, stereo and DVD player (when connected up to the cheapest monitor I could find with HDMI). I have to say for watching DVDs it is fine. If someone tells you that you can't watch media on a netbook they are talking out of their ass in the hope that you will buy something more expensive. When connected up to the monitor and USB mouse it works fine as a workstation (the built in keyboard is as good as most full size laptops). The only thing it can't do is play any recent games though it's not alone there.

It may not play HD but who really expects to play HD video on a netbook? If you have the money and the space for an HDTV surely you have the money and space for a proper HD player.

My only major complaint would be the awful mouse pad where the buttons are part of the pad's active surface, meaning that quite often the pointer will skip across the screen as you press the part of the pad where the button is supposed to be (resulting in a random click to some other part of the screen).

GMA500 is badly let down by poor drivers.

Drivers do exist for linux, but GPL issues causing packaging problems AIUI.

Ubuntu 9.04 drivers are getting there. Info here:

http://mok0.wordpress.com/2009/05/25/ubuntu-on-the-dell-mini-10-2/

If the reviewer had trouble getting 1080p video to decode smoothly, that suggests non-optimnal XP drivers were installed.

I have witnessed a GMA500 based system simultaneously decoding HD (1080p bluray rip) and SD streams (one on screen one on external display) as smooth as silk.

Vista/Win7 drivers seem to be more mature:

http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/news/9767-new-intel-gma-500-drivers-finally-show-its-potential.html

"The text in application menus, tool bars and address bars is often rather too small for comfort, especially when using the machine on the lap rather than on a desk. The same is true for the desktop text size, but at least you can increase the size of that."

Urm, maybe I'm being a bit thick here, but you can change the menus & titlebars and whatnot with whatever font at whatever size you care for, even in Windows. This has been the case since Win95, IIRC.

The settings are buried somewhere in the right click on desktop->properties dialogue box. I can't remember the exact route to get there right now - I'm sitting in front of an Ubuntu machine.

Anyway, it nice to see that higher-res screens are going to become the next big thing in netbook land, rather than being artificially restricted by Intel's pricing requirements for Atom. It doesn't look like there's much of a battery life hit, either. Pity the 6-cell job is optional, though - it's standard on more and more netbooks these days (me love my 1000HE).

Something about economies of scale and sharing panels with miniature DVD players/etc, I think.

For me the 768 is tempting - a number of the visual novels I play need at least 768 to run. Still though - I can wait another year, and what with our police force do you really want to be carrying a netbook around?

I've heard they're adding an option for 2GB of RAM some time this month, which would make it that little bit more tempting...