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Intro:

I bought this laptop to replace the company-issued one that I've used on personal excursions for a few years, since I'll soon be leaving my current employer. Portability and battery life were my primary concerns, followed immediately by price. I'm a programmer, but most of my work is done remotely by SSH, so power isn't a real concern. 90% of my intended use is a mix of ssh and firefox.

Specs:

Given my requirements, and the fact that I'm a die-hard Linux proponent, I went with the Ubuntu version with a 4GB SSD and 1GB RAM. I got the integrated wifi and bluetooth modules, as well as the 1.3MP webcam. The wifi was the only requirement, but the other two were cheap enough that I included them as amusements. I typically leave the bluetooth soft-disabled.

I've seen a number of places giving different numbers on the maximum RAM this will support, even conflicting quotes from Dell themselves. Since you can order it with 2GB straight from Dell, and since the documentation I can find on the chipset says it supports up to 2GB, I'll go ahead and say that it has a hard 2GB limit on the one memory slot.

What's in the Box:

Laptop came packed in a conservative little box with a Ubuntu CD, driver disk and the power block (which is a conveniently small wall wart, like many cellphone chargers). The box was easy to get into and well organized.

Design:

Looking at the Mini 9n makes me feel good about the cost. It's small and sleek, with a pretty black "obsidian" and silver color scheme. The display folds open smoothly without having to screw with any latching mechanism.

Screen:

The display is fairly low resolution (1024x600) and glossy. These were both potential issues for me before I got it, but I'll say that I don't really notice either of them now that I'm using it. The glossy screen is bright enough that I can use it even outdoors in the sun. Indoors I'm typically able to turn the brightness down to between the lowest and halfway marks to conserve battery life. The resolution is good enough most of the time, except that I have to scroll a bit more than I was previously accustomed.

No issues with dead pixels yet. Given how few there are relative to other screens I'm hoping that it won't be as much of a concern

Keyboard:

The keyboard is my only real complaint about the Mini 9. It's sturdy enough, I like the tactile and auditory feedback, but it's so small. The 61 keys are (mostly) big enough that they don't pose a problem for my fingers, but they sacrificed the standard layout to permit this.

They cut off the function key row, so F1 through F10 are available as Fn+ key combinations on the home row. F11 and F12 are nowhere to be found. F11 is especially missed as it's the de facto standard shortcut for putting an application into fullscreen mode, which is pretty helpful given the low resolution.

The semicolon/colon key shrunk, as well as most of the other punctuation keys. The apostrophe/quote, which is normally next to the enter key, has been moved to the bottom row between the spacebar and left arrow. The dash/underscore and equals/plus keys moved between the normal backspace and enter positions. Delete/insert is to the left of backspace.

Significant to me, as a programmer, are the bracket ([) (]), brace ({) (}), backslash (\) and pipe (|) keys, which are conspicuously moved to Fn+ combinations also. Fn+U for {, Fn+I for }, Fn+O for [, Fn+P for ], Fn+- for | and Fn+= for \. These cripple my programming speed given their relative commonality in many programming languages.

Tab and caps-lock are about a pinkies-width, which seems to be sufficient most of the time and insignificant compared to the other issues.

Given all of these issues with the keyboard, my solution is to carry an external USB keyboard (I got my hands on an old Mac keyboard that works beautifully) when I intend to do any serious programming.

Is the keyboard comfortable? Does it come with a keypad? Does it get hot? Are the function keys useful? What are the function keys? (list them starting with F1)

Touchpad:

The touchpad is small, which is to be expected, but flows seemlessly into the design of the wrist area. The problem with this is that my thumb tends to tap it pretty frequently when I'm using the space bar, causing random clicks and often text flowing into weird places it doesn't belong.

One feature I would like to see, which would probably be best done in software, would be to automatically disable the touchpad when an external mouse is connected. This would be a suitable workaround for me. Since there really isn't room to leave a buffer, I'm not sure of a good way to fix it.

Features

Multimedia Keys:

There are Fn+ combinations for volume mute, down and up on the 4, 5 and 6 keys respectively. It's convenient enough for as often as I need them, which is admittedly not that often.

LEDs:

There are two LEDs on the front, visible whether open or closed. A white one indicates the power state: steady when it's on and slow throbbing when it's in standby. A yellow one indicates something about the battery. I've seen it glowing yellow sometimes and red when the battery is particularly low, and sometimes off all together.

Wifi:

Integrated wifi works pretty well. There's no hard switch for airplane mode, but there is Fn+2 combination to disable the radios (wifi and bluetooth). Ubuntu requires a password for this operation, so it's less than convenient when I need to do it in a hurry.

Speakers:

Integrated speakers are sufficient and about what you would expect in a $250 laptop. There are two, despite some places where I've seen it identified as mono. There also appears to be an integrated microphone somewhere, but I honestly can't find it. I can do voice chat with it, but I have no idea where the mic is.

Input and Output Ports

Left (rear to front):

Kensington lock slot, power connector, USB, USB, SD/MS Pro/MMC card slot.

Right (rear to front):

10/100 ethernet, VGA, USB, mic jack, headphone jack.

Nothing on the front or rear

Bottom:

Nothing abnormal. A large panel exposes the memory and integrated modules (GPRS, Wifi, etc) when removed. Two battery lock slides, one on either side of the battery.

The only air vents are in the big removable panel on the bottom and on the right side between the USB and mic jack.

Webcam Pictures:

Webcam is surprisingly good, better than the USB logitech quickcam I bought a few years ago. Captures decent pictures and videos even in less-than-perfect light.


Size and Weight:

Weighs about two pounds, dimensions are approximately 6" by 9" by 1" when closed. It's extremely portable (unless you count the external keyboard I lug with it) and conveniently fit into an unused pocket in my backpack-style camera bag, thus saving me from having to buy another bag and/or carrying two bags.

Heat and Noise:

Operation is dead silent as it lacks a CPU/GPU/Chipset/PSU fan, hard drive spindle and optical drive. Heat has been acceptable so far, except the one time it failed to go to sleep before I put it in my bag. It was on for about an hour with no way to dissipate any heat, at which point it was uncomfortably hot. It still wasn't hot enough to burn me, I was just concerned about damage. Seems fine though.

Battery Life:

During normal use I get between 2 and 3 hours of battery life from the stock 4-cell 32Wh battery. This has variable display brightness, wifi connection, bluetooth powered off, and a shifting load from an ssh client (extremely light CPU requirement) to a web browser with a few tabs (moderate CPU requirement).

Software:

I order the Ubuntu version, which I was more than happy to see. I'd never really used this distribution before, but I wanted to show the big boys that there is a demand for free software. I could load another distro if I wanted, but this is fine for me for now. It comes preloaded with 3.5GB of stuff, which sort of blows my mind. OpenOffice.org is a big chunk of that, but I use that. Much of the rest is smaller packages that I just haven't bothered to cull through yet.

I have minor complaints to address with Ubuntu, but this isn't really the forum for that. I like the way it handles the wifi connections quite a bit more than the way Windows does, though. The battery monitor is also quite a bit nicer.

Ah yes, the ssh connection bug should be noted, too. The wireless driver (wl) is closed-source and works fine most of the time, but it apparently has some kind of weird default set that causes ssh connections to screw up during handshake (detailed here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...sh/+bug/237894). There is a workaround that has to be redone after the wireless connection is established. It's a single command line, but it requires superuser privileges so I have to enter my password again. It's irritating and I'm not sure of a good way to automate it (though I'm sure there is one). I have a shortcut for it on my panel in the meantime.

Pros:
Small, extremely portable, cheap, quiet, long battery life. Great bang for your buck if your needs are exactly the same as mine.

Cons:
Cripplingly small keyboard, trackpad is awkwardly close to the spacebar.

Conclusion:
I love my Dell Mini 9n. It does everything I expected it to do and more (found out it plays Youtube and Hulu videos just fine, as well as interfaces with my camera and iPod). I should probably have gotten a larger notebook for my normal use, though, to correct the keyboard issue. I'm curious about the differences between the Mini 9, the Mini 10 and the Mini 12; but I'm not likely to buy another laptop in the near future.

My price, as configured, was $250. Next day shipping and sales tax brought the grand total to $307. For $300 Dell reached my price/performance point and I was quite pleased to place my order.

Nice review, I have been thinking of getting one of these just for web use mainly. I have some shares im going to sell soon and Im going to get a laptop (cheap one) I have never used Ubuntu so that will be new. So it came with only 500mb spare on the drive? I hope its easy to get rid of the stuff.

Thanks. For common web use it's pretty good. The 500mb issue could be addressed by getting a larger SSD, they offer 4, 8, 16 and 32GB models; I only went with the 4 because I don't have much of a need for local storage. Otherwise, yeah, the Synaptic package manager is easy enough to use and it helps you trim the fat. I'm considering getting a 16GB SD card to augment the storage, since it's the same format my camera uses it would be handy. Here's a 16GB class 6 for $40 at Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/PNY-Class-Flas...8344818&sr=1-7

fantastic! do you have any pics?

Thanks jon!

*edit - not many benchmarks for that model yet:
http://www.notebookforums.com/review...production=all

I plan to add benchmark average sorting by weight which could be useful for analyzing performance of lite weight lappys. If you ever have the time, you can attach benchmarks here:
http://www.notebookforums.com/reviews/my-stuff.php

Well, I'm not really sure what type of benchmarks you want from me. I think all of the synthetic and gaming benchmarks that I can add are Windows-specific. There might be a linux-native version of Quake 4, or a demo that I could get my hands on, but otherwise I'm not sure I have anything to offer.

I will post a few pictures soon though. I noticed on the Dell website they strategically avoided showing the full keyboard in all of their pictures. Looks like the 12" model has a better keyboard than the 9.

There's a SuperPi version for linux.

http://service.futuremark.com/peacekeeper/index.action

As soon as we add that benchmark type. Then you can upload your web browser's benchmarks results Perfect for anybody that's not gaming.

Yeah, if you got pics, your review will show up on our homepage/reviews pages.


Super PI is time based, I disabled time based benchmarks until I can optimize the listings. We have a bunch people that already submitted super PI benchmarks too. As soon as those interfaces are up I'll let you know.

Aww, right after I run the test... well, my total calculation time for n=20 was 80.353 seconds (1.812 for I/O). Pictures in a few minutes.

Peacekeeper in Firefox 3.0.4 on Ubuntu 8.0.4 gave me a score of 104. It might have been screwed up by Firefox asking me if the script had frozen and if I wanted to kill it. Couldn't attach it to the thread either, it wasn't in the list. Maybe the new NBF will fix it

Nice pics!

Thanks for all your help pointing out bugs... We'll try to get that benchmark type added in asap

Yeh that score seems low, even for firefox.