Tesco cocks up with Dell 12 incher

By Davey Winder
Friday, 12 September 2008 20:10

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Tesco, the British supermarket giant, is currently advertising a new Dell netbook online. Nothing unusual there, you may think, but this is not the much publicised Inspiron Mini 9. This is a 12 incher that Dell has yet to announce to the world. Now that's what I call a cock up...

When Dell decided, totally unsurprisingly, to enter the booming netbook market with the Inspiron Mini 9 the media took notice. And then some. The Dell press machine had done its stuff, with consumer and technology journalists drooling over the glossy black baby laptop. Tesco, on the other hand, is a supermarket giant better known for selling baked beans really very cheaply indeed.

Which is probably why it has come as such a huge surprise, and that is an understatement, to discover that Tesco is currently advertising a 12" Dell netbook online.

Not just a surprise to web watchers. Not just a surprise to the technology press. But a huge great bloody kick in the nuts kind of surprise to Dell as well.

After all, Dell has not actually released any details of what Tesco refers to as the 'Dell Inspiron Z530 1GB 12" Web Browser' to the media as of yet.

Sure, there has been talk about Dell pulling out a 12 incher to wave in front of the world soon. Indeed, many of use were expecting just such a subnotebook to be on the list of products announced at the big Dell launch event in a couple of weeks.

I rather imagine Dell was expecting to announce it then as well.

The secondary surprise comes with the wording of that Tesco advert, which seems to position the Inspiron Z530 firmly as a netbook.

There is the Atom CPU, which you have to assume will be an Atom Z530 given that this is being called the Inspiron Z530. The Tesco advert does confuse the issue a little though, as it claims the processor speed is 1.33GHz whereas the Atom Z530 runs at 1.6GHz.

More confusing still is the fact that the Z530 isn't usually used in netbooks, that's the 1.6GHz N270 as a rule.

Would you be happy with a 12 incher? Is anything larger than 8.9 inches just too big? Find out on page 2...

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