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, 1366x768-resolution, capacitive touchscreen and push it backwards. Spin the screen, lock it into place, push the lid down, and voila, you've got a tablet!
The touchscreen itself was quite responsive to light taps, but more interesting is that it automatically launches Dell's Duo Stage UI layer once in slate mode. The interface, which packs a lot of the same social networking features as the one on the Streak, is finger-friendly and provides access to Dell's MusicStage, VideoStage, PhotoStage, and BookStage applications. It's not going to make navigating Windows 7 easier per se, but it does provide an alternative area for media consumption activities. Stay tuned for our full review of the Inspiron Duo, but in the meantime hit the play button below to see this thing flip out!
