Some netbooks just were not meant to be and Dell thinks that building ultra-portable notebooks larger than 10-inches just won't work. That's why Dell has quietly pulled its 12-inch netbook offering, the Mini 12.
While netbooks are a relatively new product, the market quickly identified netbooks with 10.1-inch screens as the sweet spot for the systems.
Still, that hasn't stopped some manufacturers, such as Acer, Lenovo and Dell, from trying to push the size of the form factor. But for Dell and its Mini 12, the computer maker felt that the form factor just wasn't right for the market.
Writing on the Dell corporate blog, the manufacturer confirmed that the Mini 12 was being pulled and explained why it decided to cut the machine from its netbook offerings.
"It really boils down to this: For a lot of customers, 10-inch displays are the sweet spot for netbooks. That's why we offer two different 10-inch Inspiron netbooks for Mini 10 and the Mini 10v. And on the Latitude side, the Latitude 2100 netbook is finding a home in schools all over the place. Portability is one of the key points for netbook customers. Larger notebooks require a little more horsepower to be really useful," the company wrote.
The low-cost, ultra-portable devices are designed for consuming content rather than creating it. Most are built with Intel Atom processors and don't have the capabilities to allow a user to do much more than check email, surf the Web and watch video. Apparently, Dell believes that as netbooks push toward the traditional form factor occupied by notebooks, customers will want more horsepower in their machines and move up to a notebook, hence the decision to cut the Mini 12.
Still, Lenovo's S12 netbook has a 12-inch form factor and Acer offers its 11.6-inch Aspire One AO751h netbook.
