That's right, ladies and gentlemen, the Dell Mini 12 is no more. After reports from Engadget and other rumor sites, Dell itself has come out and confirmed that the Mini 12 is no more. The blog entry stated that this is because most users consider 10” to be the 'sweet spot' for a netbook. Dell's blogger said something else of interest as well,

“Larger notebooks require a little more horsepower to be really useful. More to come from Dell on that later.”

This sounds to me like Dell is working on putting together a decent CULV offering, perhaps for a release this fall. A slew of CULVs from other manufacturers will be rolling out this holiday season. I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that Dell nixed their Mini 12 because they had a 12”+ CULV offering on the way in the near future.

CULVs and netbooks have very similar purposes. They're both portable, long-battery life machines that come in at a low price point. Netbooks are for people that want very small, fast booting machines that they can chuck in a purse or backpack with ease. CULVs are for people that just want more portability out of their notebooks, but need the processing power and storage capacity of a full laptop. 12” netbooks blur the line between devices, which is probably why Dell cancelled theirs. There's no sense competing with yourself.