Dell's first Mini 10 ran on Intel's "Silverthorne" Atoms, the Z520 (1.33GHz) or Z530 (1.6GHz). In December, however, the system was upgraded to the newly announced "Pineview" Atom, the N450. Although clocked about the same as the Z530 at 1.66GHz, the N450 saves on space and power consumption by incorporating a memory controller and graphics core, the GMA 3150.

Dell claimed at the time that the revised Mini 10 would get up to 9.5 hours of battery life with an optional six-cell battery. Also touted was a redesigned keyboard with sculpted keys and "a textured, smudge-resistant palm rest." according to Dell.

Dell's revised Mini 10

Now, in the newly announced "Performance Plus" edition, the Mini 10 gets the six-cell battery as standard equipment, according to Dell. More significant, the device's 10-inch display is upgraded to 1333 x 768 pixels, and the recently announced Broadcom Crystal HD (BCM70015) media accelerator is also part of the package, the company says.

The single-chip video processor is said by Broadcom to provide HD and SD video playback of standard codecs (H.264/AVC, MPEG-2, VC-1, WMV9, MPEG-4, DivX, Xvid and AVS) "with no frame drops or jitter, even under a heavy CPU load."

According to Dell "chief blogger" Lionel Menchaca, the Performance Plus version of the Mini 10 provides "optimized HD video" via the latest Beta 3 edition of Adobe's Flash 10.1 software. It's said the device can play back 1080p video from YouTube and other sites without dropping frames, as demonstrated in the Engadget story embedded at the end of this story.

Other, Windows-specific software said by Menchaca to be accelerated by the Broadcom chip includes the following:

• Windows Media Player
• Arcsoft TMT (version 2 and 3)
• Cyberlink PowerDVD
• Corel WinDVD
• Media player classic
• Media player classic - Home cinema edition
• Gom player
• Kmplayer
• XBMC
• Purecodec Player
• Nero ShowTime

Apart from the battery, display, and graphics updates, the Performance Plus version of the Mini 10 also includes Bluetooth and gets a 250GB hard disk drive instead of the standard 160GB, according to Dell. The netbook also comes with Windows 7 Starter Edition instead of the previously offered Windows XP, the company adds.



Side views of Dell's Mini 10
(Click on either to enlarge)

Some configurations of the Mini 10 are also offered with either a TV tuner or a GPS receiver. These options do not appear to be available on the Performance Plus version, however, perhaps because the Broadcom accelerator occupies a Mini PCI Express slot.


The Mini 10 playing back HD video
Source: Engadget(click to play)

Availability

The Performance Plus version of the Dell Inspiron Mini 10 appears to be available now for approximately $410. More information may be found at the Dell Online Store, here.

Adobe's Beta 3 edition of Flash Player 10.1 is downloadable here.

Lionel Menchaca's blog posting regarding the Performance Plus-equipped Mini 10 may be found here.

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