Dell’s Inspiron Mini 9 Is A Fine, Fine Netbook Computer for $350

One of the big tech trends this year has been the netbook, tiny laptops that are more portable than your average MacBook or whatever. They’re big primarily because manufacturers were like, “Hey, here’s a another type of laptop that we can convince people to buy.” Depending on how often you’re out and about, they’re actually not too bad.
And whenever there’s a trend, you can bet Dell will be there several months after it’s become popular. Hence, today’s release of the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, a netbook that, despite our seeming criticism, seems more than capable to take care of your netbooking needs.

The Mini 9 runs a version of Ubuntu, the popular Linux distribution. Dell customized the user interface a bit (by default Ubuntu uses the Gnome window manager—don’t worry if you have no idea what that means, you’re better off), which we’re not exactly sure is a good thing or not.
Other than that, for the base price of $350 you’ll find a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, 512MB RAM and a 4GB solid state drive (there’s no traditional hard drive, but rather a flash drive like in your iPod nano).
If you’re dead-set on using Windows, then you’ll need to pony up $50, but then you might want to add more RAM, too. We can’t even imagine trying to run Windows XP with only 512MB of RAM.
Again, who are these netbooks for? People who travel a lot, maybe do some light Web surfing and e-mailing from the café. Maybe you’re a businessman and the most taxing application you run is PowerPoint? You’d be fine, too. Just don’t expect to be running Photoshop while laying out a magazine in In Design and playing the latest shooter.
There’s a reason why they’re called netbooks, you know.
But if that sounds good to you, then Dell’s Mini 9 could be worth your while.
Dell Inspiron Mini 9 [Dell]