Dell Inspiron Mini 10 Available for Pre-Order On QVC, Coming Soon to Dell.com

We’ve already brought you a detailed hands-on of the Inspiron Mini 10 from CES, but now you can almost get your hands on its roomy 92 percent keyboard. Amongst handbags and kitchenware on QVC.com is the brand spankin’ new 10.1-inch member of the Mini family for $559. However,  you’ll save some money if you order through Dell.com starting on February 26. The $399 configuration on Dell.com will include a 1.3-GHz Intel Atom Z520 processor, 1GB of RAM, Windows XP Home, a 160GB hard drive, and a 3-cell battery. You also get a 10.1-inch glossy display (1024 x 576 pixels) and a 1.3-megapixel webcam. Surrounding the chassis are 3 USB ports, HDMI, VGA, Ethernet, headphone, and mic jacks. According to Dell a six-cell battery will be available at a later date for a yet-to-be-determined price. That’s nice, but you can get a netbook for less than $400 now with a six-cell battery in the 10-inch version of the Acer Aspire One and the Asus Eee PC 1000HE Currently, you can pre-order the Mini 10 on QVC, but it won’t ship until March 13. For that $559 price you get a 1.6-GHz Intel Atom Z530 processor (the standard CPU is 1.3-GHz), 1GB of RAM and a 3-cell battery (sigh)  for $559.99. Jeez: $560 for a 10-inch netbook with a 3-cell battery? Seems like quite a wad of cash to fork over when  10-inch netbooks these with six-cell batteries can be had these days for $400. Turns out that QVC bundles the system with a 4GB SD card (about $10) and some extra software, including Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 (with a street price of $25). You also get a  1.6-Ghz Intel Atom processor (which adds another $50 to the price if you look at the price delta for the processors for the Mini 12). In addition, QVC includes free shipping, which is also about $50 on Dell’s site for 3-5 day deleivery for a notebook. Throw in one year of Computrace LoJack for Laptops ($39 value) and the $559 QVC version of the Mini 10 is not a bad value. Still, we think consumers will want to configure their Mini 10 online so that they can decide what’s worth paying extra for. Stay tuned for a full review soon.