I received my Mini 9 today and thought I'd post up some info since there seemed to be a few people on here interested in them.

First, this thing is even smaller in person than it seems online. The pic below is the Mini sitting on my Toshiba 15.4" (A135-S4527 for those wanting dimensions). Basically, the Toshiba is about 2 1/4 - 2 1/2 times bigger than the Mini.




I got it off of eBay and there were a few left at the price I got as of last night. I paid $350 shipped for one that runs $450 shipped from Dell. Just search for Dell Mini 9, Buy it Now, & sort by Lowest Price with shipping if you're looking for one. This the 8GB version with XP, 512MB RAM, & a .3MP webcam (subtract the cam that I'll probably never use and it's still a $85 savings.

First impressions are good. I hate Dell laptops (at least the consumer ones, never tried one of the "business" models) typically. They always feel cheaper than the Toshibas I usually buy. This one is much different. It's insanely light and very solid. There's none of the typical play that you find in keyboards or on the casing.

The keyboard is weird. Most of it is fine but there are a couple of very annoying features. First let me say that the character keys are a good size. Even with my fat fingers, typos are rare and I've been using it for less than an hour and this is the first real typing that I've done with it. Now to the "issues". That's one of them. The '/" key is UNDER the period & beside the L arrow key. I never knew how much I used that key until now. It's annoying and it's going to be one of the hardest things to get used to. Some of the other keys are about half size including the Tab, Caps Lock, Right shift (also in an odd place under Enter and to the right of the Up arrow), colon/semicolon, and a few others. The '/" & right shift are the only ones that are REALLY annoying though. Another keyboard quirk is that the top row of keys are not offset like you'd find on a typical keyboard. The top row sits directly above the second row so that q is directly over a. The bottom row has the typical offset so it's kinda odd to have just one that way.

The touchpad has good response but there are 2 things with it that are slightly annoying. When I first cut it on, I couldn't figure out why the cursor was moving everywhere when I wasn't touching it. Well, there's no real frame around the touchpad and the top runs directly into the space bar. When I thought I was resting my thumb on the frame, I was actually on the touchpad. It also holds onto the scroll for too long. I have't figured out if it's me, a setting, or just a bad interface but 1/2 the time that you scroll, it will keep on going even after you have taken your hand off the touchpad.

Performance wise, it's suprisingly decent. The first boot up after setting it up took less than 30 seconds from off until ready to go. I've read that some people who have installed various versions of linux are booting up & ready to go in less than 20 seconds. One thing that I want to look into is that Dell is apparently shipping these setup for NTFS and disabling it will result in double the read/write speed. There is also apparently 2 different SSDs. Supposedly the 4 & 8GB versions are made by Intel and much slower than the 16GB versions made by STEC. I don't know the deal with this but upon opening mine up, the drive is STEC, NOT Intel. I also went ahead and swapped out the 512MB RAM for a 1GB stick from my Toshiba. Unfortunately, it only has 1 spot rather than the 2 found in some of the other netbooks (I believe both the Asus & Aspire have 1 soldered to the MB & 1 open slot). The book also says that it only supports 512 & 1GB sticks but reports online are that people are putting 2GB sticks in without a problem.

Battery life seems pretty good. I unplugged it at 8:11 and 50 minutes later it's at 85% with wifi on and factory settings for power consumption. At this rate, the 3:30-3:45 battery life seems pretty accurate.

Storage space. After deleting Works & Google Desktop and installing Firefox, Pidgin, & Adobe flash player I'm at 3.33GB free out of 7.11GB total.

Overall, I really like it so far. I'm going to throw some form of Linux on it sometime this weekend and I'm sure it will be even more enjoyable. When I first started using it, it seemed too small. Now, it.s a great size & makes my laptop look like a monster desktop replacement.

9/26/2008 9:07:36 PM

awesome write-up...been thinking about one of these for a while and have been wondering how functional it would be...
how about the screen size...easy to read? was thinking about one of these for the mom, but her eyes aren't so great so I'm not sure

9/26/2008 9:52:30 PM

screen is 1024 x 600. It's not really that much smaller than a normal monitor, there's just less on it. On tdub, I'd say that font size is 2 pts. smaller (i.e. 11 to 9 or so). It's still perfectly readable for me but I do tend to run the absolute highest resolutions possible so I may be a bit more accustomed to smaller text than your mom. Really though, this isn't something that you're ever going to have more than 2-3 feet away when you're using it so I don't see it being a problem for anyone with decent eyesight.

*edit* just checked ebay. Cheapest is now $369 & next is $380. Looks like the best deals were snatched up.

[Edited on September 26, 2008 at 10:20 PM. Reason : .]

9/26/2008 10:13:54 PM

2 more pieces of info.

73 wpm w/ 3 typos (and all 3 were actually me not paying attention surprisingly) vs. 83 on my laptop (& I believe 94 on my split ergo kb at work).

battery hit 10% after 2 hours 55 minutes w/ wifi on and all stock settings. I'm going to try out the Max Battery Life tomorrow at some point before I load Ubuntu.

9/26/2008 11:18:13 PM

Quote :

"so I may be a bit more accustomed to smaller text than your mom."

Hey! she has bad eyes ok!

9/27/2008 12:23:53 AM