Reviews for the new Dell Inspiron Mini 12 seem to be in the middle so far. Joanna Stern at LAPTOP Magazine has written two separate summaries of the first 12-inch mini-notebook ever (blog review, official review) and weighed up the pros and cons.

The first positive is what you see when you lay eyes on this VERY appealing model – the sleek and slim design with the glossy 12.1-inch screen. The battery life is also said to be excellent, with each charge of the six-cell battery lasting more than five hours. The keyboard is also easy to navigate and almost full sized, although as I mentioned briefly on Friday, there are many of us wondering exactly what the heck a netbook is anymore and if they shouldn’t just all be generically named subnotebooks now that new releases are reaching 12-inches in screen size.

The major negative with the Inspiron Mini 12 is reportedly very sluggish performance under Windows Vista. Vista is a hog even on many higher spec PCs, so on this model with a 1.6-GHz Intel Atom Z530 and 1GB of RAM, it leads to quite a wait. Joanna wrote, “it took over 2 minutes to get the the Vista desktop and over 4 minutes before all of the preinstalled programs, including the Dell Dock, loaded“, but also thinks that with some tweaking and removing some of the preinstalled software, it might speed up. The hard drive is also slow to perform, so for those demanding faster performance, this may not be the ideal model (at least not with Vista installed).

At a recommend retail price of $654, this is pretty pricey and the model doesn’t seem powerful enough to run Vista efficiently. The good news is that Dell will start offering the Inspiron Mini 12 with Windows XP or its customized Ubuntu Linux operating system from next month, which may turn it into a better performing model and one that lives up to its sweet look.