Recently, NBR road-tested Dell's $799 Inspiron Mini 9. This Lilliputian laptop's compact size amazed, but in the end it was just fractionally too small to allow touch-typing.

Enter Dell's Inspiron Mini 12, announced today and available worldwide from mid-November.

The company's second stab at an ultraportable notebook market (also called a "netbook" as pundits struggle to christen this fast-growning segment) is, at 1.24kg, a little heavier than the 1kg Mini 9 (if still light compared to the average laptop's 2.5kg). And it's also wider, at 30cm to the Mini 9's 23cm. But the extra real estate means a roomy keyboard and bigger display (12.1 inches to the Mini 9's 8.9 inches), whose useability could be worth the trade-off in extra bulk.

You get the same memory (1GB) standard and the same line of Intel Atom processor that delivered satisfactory peformance for the Mini 9, but a lot more storage courtesy of an 80GB traditional hard disk drive (the Mini 9 comes standard with 4GB of Flash memory on a solid state hard drive).

The Mini 12 also shares the Mini 9's b/g wi-fi, Bluetooth, 10/100 ethernet, dual USB ports, VGA out (see photo below) and 1.3 megapixel built-in web cam, but upgrades the OS from Windows XP to the more recent if less-loved Windows Vista Home Basic.

Still MIA: a built-in DVD drive, though - like other brands in this weight class - plug-in external options are available.

Like the Mini 9 ($799), the price remains pleasingly small, at $1299. Missing frills, as you'd expect at such a modest price-point, include gigabit etherneth, LED backlighting and 11.n wi-fi (the newest spec that's much faster and stable than 11/b/g). And in 1.33GHz Atom or 1.66GHz Menlo flavours, neither CPU option is for gamers or graphics pros, though they're fine for everyday office work, web surfing and light video and photo editing.

The Mini 9 was a great idea, but not useable in practice. Standby for our roadtest of the Mini 12.