Dell Inspiron Mini 9 review

So nearly perfect...

Since Asus sparked the ultra-portable craze, other laptop manufacturers have been queuing up to enter the fray. A few weeks ago, Dell dropped in with its own take, the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, which promises all the typical netbook light-weight and low-cost construction, but with the quality build and after sales care that has made Dell so popular.

Hardware-wise there's not a huge amount to make the Mini 9 stand out from the mini-sub notebook crowd. It packs the same 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU as all the rest, a respectable, if not outstanding 1GB of RAM, a choice of XP or Linux (although recent gripes about the drive partition sizes have made XP the better choice so far), and you get a choice of 8GB or 16GB SSDs.

These actually have a couple of big advantages over capacious HDDs - firstly, it means the Mini 9 is whisper quiet. No scratch that - it's not quiet; it doesn't make a noise at all. No grinding discs, no CPU fan, nada. Secondly, its boot time is incredibly swift. Resuming XP from standby takes about 30 seconds; booting from scratch takes 1 minute 15 seconds, but you could cut that down to 60 seconds by removing some of Dell's pre-packaged programs that slow things down.

Our favourite feature of the Mini 9 is the solid build quality. Some Eee PC clones can be tacky, with their fittings not sitting together perfectly. That's not the case here - the Mini 9 feels every bit like a proper Dell laptop and has a gorgeous glossy finish to match its pricier laptop ranges.

Naturally, on a device this small, compromises have to be made somewhere. Unfortunately, it's the keyboard that caught the brunt of it. Most keys are fractionally smaller than on most rivals. The difference isn't vast, but every millimetre counts on a keyboard of this scale.

The Caps Lock key is situated a little too close to Left Shift, so you can easily hit it by accident and instantly transform yourself into MR SHOUTY, BANE OF THE INTERNET FORUM. The Full Stop key is just pathetically small and the Right Shift nearly unreachable. The Delete key is located on the bottom row for some obscure reason. It's right next to the Left Arrow, so pretty much exactly where you don't need it when editing text.

Yet, for all these whinges, we must point out that this entire review has been written on the Mini 9 and without any major drop in typing speed or succumbing to hand cramp.

The mouse trackpad deserves a special mention for its quality. When we went hands on with an early version of this machine, we complained that the mouse action was too violent and made accurate pointing difficult. Dell has definitely ironed out that particular kink and it's a very usable, uncompromised pad with none of the silly repositioning of the mouse buttons that Aspire One users have to suffer.

The battery life is also praise-worthy; the 4-cell battery gives you a significant shot of extra juice compared to more standard 3-cell offerings and we found it lasted for around four hours of ordinary operation. Dell hasn't let the larger battery affect the weight either - the system comes in at just a fraction over 1kg, which competes well with HP's Mini-note, the MSI wind and the Asus Eee PC 901.

With the keyboard as the only serious blemish on the Mini 9's record, Dell has come up with a very worthy netbook offering. It's solid, robust and good looking to boot.

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User Comments

By patsyann2

27|11|2008 12:21

fabulous piece of kit

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The Caps Lock key is situated a little too close to Left Shift, so you can easily hit it by accident and instantly transform yourself into MR SHOUTY, BANE OF THE INTERNET FORUM