After selling both my Eee PC 701 and 900 and giving up my laptop for a big honkin’ desktop, I’ve been feeling a void in the mini notebook part of my life. Ideally, of course, Apple would make a netbook, but they don’t — and if they did, I probably couldn’t afford it anyway. I waited for the Dell Mini 9 to be released, thinking it might be the one. I really liked the Eees, but one thing really annoyed me: Asus’ insistence on splitting the Solid State Drive into two pieces. I realize they did it to cut costs, and because SSD availability has been limited until recently, but it was a pain in the ass to work around. I hoped Dell’s entry into the netbook market would have a single SSD, and guess what? It does.
The 910 specs are about what you see in any other netbook at this point. It comes in high-gloss black or white, no other colors yet. It has a very shiny 8.9″ display with 1024 x 600 resolution. The processor is an Intel Atom N270, with 1.6GHz/533Mhz FSB, and the graphics card is the Intel GMA 950. The wireless card is 802.11g, and the battery is an unremarkable 4 cell, which should give around 3 hours or so of life on a full charge. An extra battery is available from Dell, for a whopping $150. NotebookReview.com has an excellent full review of the Dell Mini, so I won’t reinvent that particular wheel. 
There are essentially three base configurations of the Dell 910, including one which is sort of on sale today:
- Ubuntu operating system (I’ll talk more about that later), 512MB RAM, 4GB SSD, for a base price of $349. This is upgradeable to 1GB of DDR2 for $25. You can also bump up the hard drive to 8GB for $35, or to 16GB for $75.
- WinXP Home operating system, 512MB RAM, 8GB SSD, for a base price of $424, minus $25 “instant savings” for a total of $399. Dell’s “instant savings” thing irritates me — why not just say, the base price is $399?
- WinXP Home operating system, 1GB RAM, 16GB SSD, for a base price of $489, minus $40 “instant savings” = $449 total.
Today only (10/16/08), Dell is having a sale on the Mini 910, but it’s a typical Dell faux discount. Essentially they are offering the WinXP / 1GB / 16GB configuration listed in #3 above, except they’ve changed the SSD to 8GB and reduce the starting price by $10 to $479. If you upgrade that to the 16GB to match the original configuration, your starting price jumps to $519. The
You also have the option of adding Bluetooth for $20, a 0.3MP webcam for $15, or a 1.3 MP webcam for $25. As of today, both WinXP and Ubuntu configs are listed with a preliminary ship date of 10/31, but if you add a webcam, the date is pushed out to 11/5.
Before deciding on which upgrades you might need, please note that the Dell Minis are even easier to upgrade on your own than the Eee PC. There’s a little hatch on the back that pops off with just a couple of screws, giving you access to all sorts of things.
IMO, the two key upgrades are:
- RAM — I’d probably replace the RAM with a 2GB stick, which is very easy to do and not expensive — currently you can get a good Kingston module for under $30 at newegg.
- SSD — After my experience with the Eee 701 with 4GB hard drive, I strongly recommend upgrading to at least 16GB. This is something you can easily do yourself, and SSD prices are really starting to come down now — I’ve seen a decent 32GB module for just $99, or a 64GB for $159 (try My Digital Discount). There’s a great instructional video at JKKMobile.
My assessment is that if you plan on upgrading both the RAM and SSD, you might as well get the base model Dell 910 — you can save yourself $100 on Dell upgrades and put that cash towards upgrading on your own. This means you can upgrade to 2GB RAM and 32GB SSD — neither of which are offered by Dell — for an additional $30, and get some really kickass performance from your little baby notebook.
One final note on the Mini 910 — Dell offers a few different Timbuk2 custom cases for this little pup…and one of them is pink! Well, pink and black, anyway. I was very happy to see a big conglomeration like Dell partner with a small, relatively independent company like Timbuk2, and it’s also good to see Timbuk2 branch out a little from their usually Mac-focused products. They make excellent-quality stuff, and I love supporting the little guy. You can’t get the Dell Mini sleeves on the Timbuk2 site though, only through Dell.
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