Recent Gadgetry… Part 3 (Dell Mini 9)
My brother ordered a Dell Mini 9 for my wife and myself a while back and we received the machine yesterday. I received it at work, which is probably better than home, with my eee 1000 was here, as well as an Asus S101 and 3 Asus eee 901 (may 904, 904ha, 900, 901ha, it is getting hard to tell), so comparison could be done with a wide array of netbooks (as far as with Asus). The size is roughly the same as the 901 eee, and about 1.5″ smaller (length and width) than the 2 10.2″ netbooks. The 901 and eee 1000 were a little taller than the Mini 9, with the S101 quite a bit shorter. This is to be expected as the eee machines have 6-cell batteries that are a little taller and raise the machines up a bit, compared to the 4-cell within the Mini 9. The S101 has a very thin battery and is a decent bit thinner than the Mini 9. The keyboard is strange, it is basically the same size as the 8.9″ eee but it is a lot easier to type on because the function keys (f1,f2,etc) are fn keys, going from the “a” key to the “;” key. The letter keys were a lot bigger than the other keys, which made typing words faster than on the 901 eee, but using shift, tab and some other buttons were greatly hampered.
The specs on the Mini 9 are the 1.6 GHz Atom (N270), 1 GB of DDR2 ram, 8.9″ 1024 x 600 lcd, and a 16 GB SSD. The os is Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) with a customized desktop launcher. I do not care too much for the launcher, but apparently Jenn does, as she got mad at me for changing the desktop mode to the standard gnome desktop. The SSD speed was hoovering between 66.7 MB/s and 69.8 MB/s, versus the 34 MB/s on the eee 100 with “40 GB SSD” (it is actually two different controllers, one with 8 GB and one with 32 GB) I have. The eee 901 (with a 120 GB hdd) was getting around 66 MB/s and the eee S101 was getting between 76 MB/s and maxing at 99 MB/s.
I plan on acquiring a 2 GB stick of ram to max out the Mini 9 and hope to do some more testing/playing with this device. My first impression of this device is that it is a solid entry into the netbook realm. There are some minor quirks but for the most part it is a good device. One thing that made me mad was that the motherboard supports a WWAN device and had the solder points showing when you remove the back panel (and “WWAN” written in big white letters so that you know it). The connector for the WWAN device however, is not soldered on. It is like Dell is saying, yeah we could give you the ability to add a WWAN controler later if you want, but we aren’t going to.
