Dell Mini 9 Hands-on Review
A saavy techie friend (an Nokia 800 early adopter) writes: “I just picked up a Dell Mini 9, my current favorite in the netbook class for these reasons:”
Solid-State HD (mine is 32GB)
Pre-loaded with Ubuntu (Win XP also available)
SDHC slot
Fanless, completely silent operationIn my case, the Nokia N800 has gone the way of the Dodo in place of the Dell Mini 9. It’s not is pocketable, but is about 1/3 the size of my 15″ Macbook Pro.
Cons: choppy playback of streaming flash video (good chance that’s not a problem in the winXP version), not perfectly reliable coming out of sleep, read/write to SSD is sometimes noticeably slow
Pros: with VLC, the Dell Mini pretty much plays back any video format you can throw at it. And… you can open it fully on the tray table of a coach class airline seat :)
I’m planning on loading either XBMC or it’s alpha cousin Boxee as a mulltimedia front-end, which if I can get it to work well will be pretty fantastic.
[added later]
I asked my friend which model he selected. He responded:
32GB SSD, 1GB RAM. Bought it for $425 on Black Friday.
[I asked about the 1 GB RAM limitation of the Dell, and many other netbooks]
The RAM thing doesn’t bother me that much because I plan on not being that intense with my usage on this thing, i.e., if I’m watching a movie on it, that’s all I’ll be doing, etc.
The keyboard is usable but small enough that you wouldn’t want to use it for an extended period.