The keyboard is large enough to type on easily, but the "extra" keys like function keys, Home/End, and arrows are a bit cramped. The trackpad is the biggest bother. It's a sort of buttonless design where you need to press on the lower left or right corner to left- or right-click, but it's hard to use in practice. You'll often move the pointer when trying to click, resulting in more mis-clicks and no-clicks than you should really have to deal with.

The Mini 10's performance is about what you would expect from an Atom-based notebook. Even running just Windows XP, the system quickly becomes unresponsive. Though low performance is a fact of life on most netbooks, the Mini 10 performed a tad worse than most of its competition, scoring just 32 on WorldBench 6. The best netbooks in its price range score in the upper 30s. Battery life is good at a little under 7 hours, but not as stellar as the or the (the later lasts a little under 10 hours). You can't even "hackintosh" the Mini 10 (the process of buying a compatible notebook and installing OS X on it). The integrated GMA500 graphics is incompatible.

All that said, this $500-plus netbook seems a little pricey because of all the extra on-board bells and whistles that came with our review model. Drop down to a lower-res screen, forget the TV tuner, and you have a decent machine that would probably cost you somewhere in the neighborhood of $400. Dell's intentions are in the right place with the Mini 10, but a netbook with a tiny screen and limited storage is not the ideal platform for a TV tuner, and they're just not winning us over on the benchmarks or industrial design. If you're in the market for a 10-inch netbook, you can do better.