The Dell Mini Inspiron 9 has just started to ship and some folks have already started to review it. It’s been getting very good reviews.

Their are some write ups here;

The Way Review

pclaptop Review

Cnet Video review;

A nice video review of the Dell Inspiron Mini;

The page which details dells $99 Mini Inspiron deal is here. Their is only one catch the cost of the Mini Inspiron is added to the price of the other laptop that you have to buy, so you end up saving more or less nothing, ouch.

Today I had a short chat with dell UK and it seems they are remaining tight lipped about the Ubuntu Version coming out in the UK which leaves us with the Expensive XP Version only. It does not take a mastermind to figure out that the acer aspire one is the most attractive Netbook to UK consumers at the moment as it’s Widely Available and costs a lot less;

To be fair to Dell the Mini Inspiron is very hackable and Dell is good a reducing prices and very good for offers etc. but theirs no word of any $99 deals at the Dell website. The manual seems very concise when it comes to stripping this machine down;

Well our suspicions have been confirmed, the dell mini inspiron will launch on Thursday and will have a price tag of between $300 and $400, the mini inspiron is expected to have the following specifications and features;

• 1.6GHz Atom CPU
• 512 MB DDR2 RAM (Upgradeable to 2GB)
• 8.9 Inch LED lit Screen (1024×600 resolution)
• B/G standard Wireless networking
• Ethernet and 3 USB ports

Also online storage will be available, will this mean a smaller ssd drive. Some have speculated that it will come with an 8 Gb solid state drive like the acer aspire one but we will have to wait until tomorrow to find out for sure.

As we have heard in the past sky is very reluctant to support Linux with their downloads service, however will the rise of Netbooks change this? Will this new source of Linux popularity change the minds of the people at sky and make them sit up and listen or will they remain ignorant and arrogant? I think that it is shameful to prevent the use of a service that the customers have paid for, just because of their choice of operating system.

It is great to see linux leading in the cutting edge of technology, providing devices previously reserved for the people who could afford them, for a price that almost anyone can afford. I can only see these netbooks getting cheaper with time. Digital watches were once expensive but now they are a dime a dozen. As new manufactures enter this market prices will begin to fall further. This is truly an exciting year for linux and its users.

Netbooks have also been solving some problems for linux as far as desktop use is concerned. In the past users have complained about it being difficult to use and the amount of time that it takes to boot, but asus with their eeePC have changed this. The eeePC used a program called fast init, which can boot the OS in less than 20 seconds. I’m hoping that these devices can have as much of an impact on linux as a desktop OS, as Ubuntu has had.

Dell has renamed the mini Insprion to the Inspiron 910. We can expect an announcement from dell on the 22nd of August . The dell mini inspiron is expected to be powered by the Atom 1.6GHz processor. Will have 512MB or 1GB of RAM and 4/8/16GB of flash storage. We can expect to see Ubuntu Linux or Windows Xp Operating systems running on this netbook.

Story

Not much is known about the dell mini inspiron yet, other than the fact that it looks great but we think it’s going to be difficult for dell to mess this up as they are such a large company and we figured it would be fun to try and guess what dells going to be loading into this machine (see the table below);

Like I have stated above this is just a guess.