Dell Mini 9n Netbook Review

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.

Limited Storage

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

Pictures and benchmarks

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.

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

Re: Battery life

So, it's been over a year since I bought my Mini 9 and I thought it would be helpful to post a follow-up.

My usage pattern started off pretty consistently with a few hours a day of Internet browsing, email checking, listening to music and ssh sessions. I took care to not leave it plugged in when the battery was fully charged, but I'm not as experienced with battery conditioning techniques as I apparently need to be. Seems to me that the hardware/firmware should take care of that, but whatever. This pattern was consistent for about 6 months and battery life stayed in the 4-5 hour range most of the time.

Around the beginning of this year my employer bought me a Dell Latitude E6500. The larger screen brought me back to the real world and I basically stopped using my Mini for several months. I picked it up again about two months ago, plugged it in and turned it on. After about two hours of charging I unplugged it to move and it immediately cut off--the battery is completely unserviceable less than two years into its life. I'll take partial blame on this, and I was considering getting the larger capacity battery anyway, but this seems unreasonable to me. We'll see what my E6500 does in another year, as my usage pattern is about the same.

I noticed, when I was using it regularly, that it seemed to be starting up more slowly over time. I'd wager this is related to the small 4GB SSD I bought with it. Since I was running Linux, I thought this would be sufficient for primary storage. I was wrong, since it became my primary use PC and I loaded it to about 98% capacity with applications alone. It's probably time for a wipe and fresh start. A new battery and clean O/S would probably bring it right back to life.

Speaking of the OS, the Dell-branded Ubuntu that came with it was always a little off. The upgrade utility couldn't seem to handle the Dell repositories or something and so it would often report errors. It was also unable to upgrade to the new major release, so I'm stuck (now) two major release versions behind. A vanilla Ubuntu netbook install would be preferable. At least I didn't have to pay the Microsoft tax--thanks for that, at least.

In short: the hardware (except the battery) seems to have held up well. I don't know of any errors with the SSD, despite my heavy overloading. The software isn't perfect but it's hard to really complain about. I still would recommend getting the 10 or 11" model, as the screen is absolutely tiny and the keyboard is to match. It's still useful to me, just to have sitting around in the living room.

I ordered on the Dell website, I think there was a little sale on at the time that made it cheaper than Amazon.com or the like. Like I said, I've been really happy with the whole experience, except the battery. To my knowledge, battery wear isn't covered under any warranty, but I haven't checked because I'm out of warranty now anyway.

The only time I've spoken to a Dell rep on the phone was for a tech support issue. I traveled and upon return found it refused to charge at all. The Dell guy had me check if airplane mode was on, which it was, because it apparently does not charge in airplane mode. I felt like an idiot... 10 years in IT and I can still miss something like that.

My advice on making decisions is to make them yourself based on the best information you can get. If you have a Best Buy or other big electronics store nearby, go there to play. See what they have, touch them, do simple tasks, see how they feel. Some things you just can't get from the internet or phone: how does the keyboard feel as you type? If the keys are too shallow or the backing is flimsy, you'll hate it. In the case on the Mini 9n, the keys are somewhat smaller than on a standard keyboard, and boy is it ever obvious. I've got long, thin fingers and I have a hard time using it for any length of time--I have a USB keyboard for doing any significant work on it. If I'd played beforehand, I would've probably gotten the Mini 10, as I think it's somewhat bigger. Don't trust forum posts 100% though, even when we try to be completely objective we never hit the mark perfectly.

Best of luck in your purchase.