Dell Inspiron Duo

With zippier hardware and a better battery, the flip-screen Dell Inspiron Duo could be a solid multimedia tablet/laptop combo.

As you may have guessed, the Inspiron Duo looks like your regular netbook from afar. It’s got a shiny lid — it’ll be available in that “Marlin” blue color as well as in “foggy night” black and “fastback” red — and its plastic edges house the typical ports, including two USB ports and one audio jack. Under the lid it’s got a nice feeling chiclet keyboard that looks quite similar to the one on the Dell Inspiron M101z and a decently sized touchpad with two dedicated mouse buttons. Yep, it sounds like your run-of-the-mill netbook, that is until you take a look at its 10.1-inch, 1366×768-resolution, capacitive touchscreen and push it backwards. When the screen is flipped over and the lid closed, the system launches a touch-friendly interface for interacting with photos, videos, and music, and returns to the basic Windows desktop when the transformation is reversed.

Despite the inventive construction and decent software design, the Duo is far from perfect. This is essentially a Netbook, and even though it has the latest dual-core Intel N550 Atom CPU and 2GB of RAM, it feels slow at times, especially in tablet mode, perhaps exacerbated by the overhead added by the touch hardware. Meanwhile, the system works best when paired with its optional dock, which provides better speakers for music and video playback, useful ports, and holds the system upright for use as an Internet appliance.

However, you still have to take care to turn the screen only in the correct direction, essentially pushing the top of the screen back through the lid. Also, when flipping the screen back, it’s important to make sure the system is open wide enough so you don’t smack the bottom of the screen into the keyboard.