Dell Inspiron Mini 9

I ordered myself a netbook last week, and it finally came on Saturday. A couple of folks have been asking me about my experiences with it, so I figured I'd provide a short review for those looking at buying themselves a netbook.

Specs
I got a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 because I found it on sale -- $300 for Ubuntu with an 8Gb solid state hard drive, 1Gb RAM, Bluetooth, and 1.3Mp camera. This makes it by far the cheapest computer I've ever bought, but also the most I've ever paid for hard disk space. But I digress.

Before I go on...
Generally, I am of the opinion that Dells are crap machines. My roommate had a Dell in college and the only advantage his had over my ThinkPad T41 (and then over my MacBook Pro) was that he would get a higher score than me on flash-based games because the game would have to slow down for him to play it. Which is why he refused for the longest time to upgrade his laptop, even when the thing roared like a jet engine because after 5 minutes of usage it had to hit the fans into high gear to stop itself from melting.

So, in my mind, Dell is a synonym for a crap computer with poor heat & noise management and crappy plastic construction.

But, for $300, I wasn't expecting a MacBook Air, so I was willing to give it a shot.

First Impressions

Despite my predisposition against the brand, I was actually quite pleased with the machine. It feels pretty well built and is amazingly silent. It's quieter than my MacBook Pro, and it's the sort of difference that can only be heard when I put my ear right up to the fan. Very impressive.

In a few of my marathon sessions of using the device, the bottom did become a bit warm. However, it never got so hot as to be really uncomfortable to have in your lap, like any of the other laptops I've played with. So all and all, I felt good using it.

Battery Life
The battery lasted a good while, too. I got about 4 hours of usage out of the device when starting from a full charge. During that time, I had roughly 3 programs open: Firefox, Pidgin, and Adobe Reader. I also toyed with some of the built-in programs, like the cheap linux games & camera stuff. Speaking of which...

Built-in Software
A lot of the software that came on the device was generally what you'd find with any Linux distro -- some Gnome-based games, a Minesweeper clone, a typing tutor, OpenOffice, etc. A lot of the prepopulated web links were to Dell or Yahoo, so I'm sure they've got some deal going on there.

There's also a program called the Dell launcher, which feels like a less polished version of Apple's Stacks. If you're OK with not seeing the desktop, this is a surprisingly easy and intuitive way to launch your programs. As you can see, one of the first things I did was add Emacs to mine.

You'll also notice that the topbar is partially offscreen. This is because I told it to auto-hide so I could use as much of the 9-inch screen as possible. I also added a firefox plugin to remove the "File".

Keyboard Quirks
For the most part, the keyboard is fine. Yes, it's a bit smaller than a full keyboard, but I was expecting that for a tiny netbook. After typing on it for a bit, you don't really notice how much smaller the keyboard is.

With one tiny exception.

Apparently, the engineers at Dell decided that us touch-type folks didn't ever really use concatenations or quotations when we were trying to type on the go, so they took the single- and double-quote key and moved it below the "." key. At first this was a bit annoying but it's gotten the part where it's actually pissing me off quite a bit. There's no sense in me trying to fight years of muscle-memory just for this one keyboard, and the result is that any IM conversation where I try to use "don't" or "I've" results in me accidentally sending the message mid-word. And I've done this a lot.

I've given up trying to correct this error, so if you're chatting with me and you see this happening, you'll know what computer I'm on.

(Also, the "-" or "_" key is now moved to just right of "p", which is a problem I've run into a few times in IM conversations, but it's nowhere as bad as the damn apostrophe thing)

Performance
In lieu of doing official, statistics-like testing, here are a few tidbits I've gotten from just using it or maybe timing it with a stop watch:

• Startup takes just over 30s from a cold start.
• Startup takes about 5s when resuming from a suspended state. 
• Hulu videos play fine when windowed at standard resolution. Bumping them up to high resolution or expanding full screen results in dropped frames.
• Camera (with "Cheese", a Photo Booth knock-off) takes higher-resolution pictures than the camera on my MacBook Pro, but the center of the picture is a bit blurry. (see below)
• Built-in speakers are pretty loud-- as loud or louder than my MacBook Pro.

(Left: Photo Booth picture. Right: Cheese picture. Both images were taken at the same time.)

Minor Quirks

There were a few things that struck me as odd or annoying. 

• If you don't interact with the computer for a few minutes, it forgets that you set the brightness on the display, and decides to crank it up. Which results in me cranking the brightness down time and time again.
• "Cheese" can use the built-in camera to take video, but it records in .ogg format. This in itself isn't a problem, except that the Totem Media player doesn't play that file type. I imagine this will go away when I install VLC.
• Scrolling can be a bit laggy when you use the sides of the trackpad for vertical or horizontal scrolling. It's been hit or miss for me with being very responsive, and "Oh crap its still scrolling nooooo"

Final Verdict

In sort, I'd recommend the Inspiron Mini 9, but definitely as a secondary machine. It's got pretty decent power & battery life for a portable computer, and I've enjoyed toying with it for a weekend. 

It also makes my 15" screen feel insanely large for a laptop after getting accustomed to 9". :)

PS: My website renders perfectly on Firefox/Ubuntu despite no prior testing. This is why standards are awesome.