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The great hope of all of those longing to see Netbooks brought back down to their original low-priced roots, the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, has finally arrived in both the US and Europe. According to Dell’s website, it has all the specs, features, flavors and price-points that were leaked, oh, how long was it, three years ago or so? Never let it be said Dell rushes a product to market. Late for the back to School rush, but just in time for Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Winter Solstice….and definitely one of the sharper looking Netbooks on offer.

As promised, the low end Ubuntu model comes in at 349 dollars, with an 8.9 screen, 4G SSD, Atom CPU etcetera, etcetera. Higher end machines, with XP and 8G SSDs come in at $449. Thank the Lords they dropped that silly E name. All we would have needed for total Circuit City meltdown would have been for some other vendor to produce an Ee netbook.

“So, let me show you our Netbook options. We have the Es, some very nice Ees, a whole mess of Eees,,perhaps an E XL, or and Eee 3200EXE or an Ee E400WE. Will you want that with an Atom chip, or an Ato? Perhaps a Tom?”

The advance reviews have been good, the specs are co,perable with the middle/low end of the netbook market, and the price point is quite reasonable and looks really good up against the Winds and Eees. With reports that both the HP Mininote and the Acer Aspire One have been selling very well but under the radar of many consumers, I have great hopes for this machine. The Netbook niche has needed a new “Must Have” model since Asus lost the crown by going insane (The Eee Monitor? What the devil do they put in the water in Taiwan?) I only wish they hadn’t called it the Inspiron Mini, but the Axim Maxi. Ah well.

So what do you think, is Dell going to be this years Asus in the Netbook/UMPC market after all?

(Source – Engadget)

Zealot (444 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).