My dell mini 9 arrived 2 weeks ago. I purchased this for the primary reason to work on my blog. I hope to better utilize my commuting hours on the bus. In theory this should allow me to post more and if not more then at least it will give me back some of my evening hours to myself. The deciding factor for me to get a netbook was size. I was looking for something light and easy to type on for about 1-2 hours a day on a bus seat. Since buses do not have power outlets, battery life was a concern too. I hoped to get one full day’s commute in a charge, and recharge at night if needed.

Here are my first impressions of using the machine for 2 weeks.
I purchased the dell mini 9 with 1Gb ram, 16GB Solid State Drive and Ubuntu.
It is fast. For a little machine, it works very well. My Linux is not currently up to speed, although I worked extensively with UNIX in college. So I figured things would come back to me as needed. And so far that has been the case. I get along great with the GUI, and am slowly refreshing my command line skills.

I don’t mind the small screen. The resolution is very clear, and easy to read and even browse the web.
I do have a few minor issues with the keyboard. It is large enough that you are tempted to touch type with it but small enough that that gets awkward. I find myself stuck in some hybrid cross between hunt and peck, and touch typing. The oddest thing for me so far is the shift key. The shift key that I tend to use is the bottom right key. On the Mini 9 it happens to be quite small, half the size of the shift key on the left. This causes problems and I wind upon hitting the up arrow more often that I care to. But I’m training myself to use the left shift more often. As a matter of fact, and whole bottom right of the keyboard is a little awkward. The arrow keys, apostrophe, and various other punctuation keys are in the wrong place. But I’m keeping and open mind.

Dell removed the function keys in order to keep the key sizes close to standard size. I like this feature. Sacrificing a row of seldom used keys for comfort is fine fine with me. I could do without the windows key, as it is useless on the Ubuntu install.

The case is solid and I got the white glossy cover. I know I sold out and went with the trendy Mac looking cover, but it was the same price and I decided to go for it. So far its really nice and doesn’t pick up fingerprints like I thought it would.

The battery life seems good, on 100% charge it indicates about 4 hours run time when off my network and 3.5 when on. I assume with the SSD, and not using WiFi, I will get decent battery life.

Because of the SSD drive, there is no fan. The machine runs extremely cool and quiet. In fact there are no moving parts at all on this machine. Dell gets good tech points for this.

All in all I find it a nice little machine. I imagine it would run a lot slower with XP. Because this is a machine that is going to be primarily used for word processing, browsing the internet and playing with some new development technologies from time to time, this is the way I wanted to go. My wife is instantly jealous as here year old 15” Inspiron weighs considerably more, and she is not a fan of lugging it around work. I think a second netbook will be purchased in a few months. She would probably be more comfortable with XP, but that would require more RAM and probably a larger traditional hard drive. I haven’t decided which way to go yet.

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experiences by bill breen