Inspiron Mini 9?

[Mark Komarinski]

On 01/09/2009 10:21 PM, Mark Komarinski wrote:
> Does anyone have one of these wee beasts?  I'm headed to Hawaii for a 
> week in February and want to take something that's even smaller and 
> lighter than my Thinkpad X61 (which is already pretty small).  I'd like 
> to hear your thoughts.
>
> I want to use it to:
>
> - charge various USB devices (i.e. blackberry, ipod touch, etc.)
> - upload photos from my camera to my home server
> - IMAP for my mail, web browser for gmail
> - remaining amused on the plane (or is that overly hopeful?)
>   
Thanks everyone who gave suggestions.   I wound up getting a refurb Mini 
9 for not a lot of money (under $400 for 16GB SSD, 1GB RAM).  The cost 
was right, I wanted something without a spinning hard drive, with wifi 
and bluetooth.  As far as my requirements above, it plays full screen 
video nicely, can charge all my USB-aware devices and has Thunderbird 
and Mozilla.  As for my camera, I couldn't get it to be recognized 
directly, but the memory card works fine.

It had Windows XP on it, but installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix was very 
simple.  So simple, I didn't have anything on the display except a 
flashing cursor while it installed.  I was wondering if there was a 
problem with the CD I used until it rebooted and the ubuntu logo showed up.

The keyboard issues people have mentioned are there, but it's not a 
showstopper for me.  The trackpad is more annoying, but it looks like 
all netbooks have them.  Battery life so far is decent and the interface 
for UNR is really nice.   There's less need for the keyboard than you 
think, at least for something that's just acting as something that's 
bigger than a PDA but smaller than a laptop/desktop.  I figure if I can 
deal with a Blackberry or Treo keyboard, I can get used to this one.

I can see this becoming really popular in the next few years.  As wifi 
and/or WWAN becomes more of a utility, it doesn't matter if you have 
16GB or 250GB or 1TB of storage so long as you can get to the Internet, 
you're set.  I'll see how far I can take this.

-Mark