It's already confirmed
for this week. Now
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Dell Inspiron 910 Mini netbook will be announced on Thursday the 4th courtesy of an eMail received from Box.net, an online photo and document storage service already seen bundled with
Creative's Vado Pocket Video Cam. Apparently, Box.net services will "come pre-installed on the Dell Mini." A Dell spokeswoman confirmed that Dell is working with Box.net for online storage. A person familiar with the matter says that the Mini will likely sell for less than $400, run your choice of Windows or Linux (
Ubuntu, is our guess), and sport a display slightly less than 9-inches. You know, all this service talk has us wondering if this will also be Dell's first laptop with its
Zing-based audio and video services bundle. Fortunately, we'll know tomorrow.
P.S. That image above is from
these earlier leaks and matches the keyboard configuration in
Dell's own support documents. In other words, it's what we expect to see tomorrow.
Update: Heh, so much for that image above. Dell has updated the
support docs again. See the new keyboard after the break.
posted Sep 3rd 2008 3:01AM
Just in time to stop me buying an Acer Aspire One
By the looks, Acer Aspire One beats it by FAR ! Specs, dunno. Id choose Acer.
Shrug. Okay...
damn, the acer with 120gb hdd,xp for $399 sound real good. If dell can match or beat this, i'm in.
@ishism -- $399? you mean...$349...check Micro Center and BB...
$329 at newegg...
if this has Express Gate then I am buying one of these.
After getting me new Eee Box, if it ain't got Express gate it ain't worth it.
Yes, but too early to choose this or the lattitude E4200
I'll make a bold prediction:
That keyboard isn't final.
Hope so.
BTW, compare this picture with the previous Inspiron 910 page on Engadget.
Keyboard is DIFFERENT!
On the right, above the num keys, a four-key console-like thingy appears and disappears.
Yeah, both of those pictures are fairly old; we have reason to hope!
The picture used is our best guess as to the final product. Post updated with explanation.
Thomas
WHat??! 400?? was hoping for the $300 price point.
Guess the included Box.net services are snitching the extra $100.
I really wish it had one of those pointer mice. I don't care for track-pads at all.
Phanbuoy is a comment whore.
you be quiet, good sir!
Another mystery photo that links to basically nothing. This is a growing trend on Engadget.
Don't throw an unexplained picture up there when that picture doesn't exist in the linked-to source.
Yeah yeah here it comes again. Like I'm REALLY gonna red-circle that date. pufff
I have waited for this thing for long.. but now I have started liking the inspiron 13.
Looking good, Dell!
I'm still after something which is 10-12 inches, where is the E-Slim you promised us?
I'm sure there are plenty of people out there looking for 10-12 inches.
I want the 12" version over this also. I need something closer to a regular keyboard. The better specs don't hurt either.
There are lots of good 13" notebooks out there. Just buy one of them.
any idea how much RAM can it take? hopefully 2G... and have options of SSD and HDD...
Box.net is devoted to kill any chance that this netbook comes with an HDD.
My advice:
Get a 16G SD card. Insert and forget.
It's all about the battery life...the basis for all these netbooks is almost all the same and only marginall different between most brands (MSI, Acer, and Asus netbooks) Give us 5+ hours and the Mini Inspiron will be printing money like the DS.
I agree on battery life but I was under the impression All Acer and Msi netbooks had 3 cell batteries but Asus eee's 1000 forward had 6 cell. Clearly making the Asus eee pc 1000h the netbook of choice.
The $400 Aspire One model comes with a six cell battery and is quite a nice choice, feature wise.
I see you're making a better online marketing idiot here.
Nice job! Now there's a lifted bar for idiot-proof technology. Bravo!
What a cunning stunt...
How can you touch-type on this thing? Look at the alignment of the keys! The "Q" is directly over the "A", not offset like ALL other keyboards. Unless this changes, forget it.
Agreed - that keyboard looks completely atrocious. If you can't touchtype on it, then why even bother with a QWERTY layout? It should just be alphabetical.
less than $400? so $399.99 and £399.99 then.
£399.99 is NOT less than $400.
I was thinking the exact same thing.
He's referring to the somehow magical pricehike that a product gets when it comes over to the UK, quite often 1.5-2x the US price especially when it comes to electronics hardware.
And the keyboard still sucks, wasted space above it they could've used for F# keys and the key alignment is just wrong.
Well the direct translation would be $400=£225 but in the world of electronics importers this is never the case. I expect at least £299.99.
why so much space at north of the keyboard?
they could have included the f-keys.
That's usually where dell puts the head pipes and fins and doodads like that. Also voltage control circuits, Things of that nature., the tall bits (caps and the like) can't go under the keyboard they have to go somewhere in a laptop this small :D
Well, there's probably... you know... components under there. So the thing isn't just a keyboard with a screen.
Why didn't they move the "tab" key over next to the "backslash" key.? This way the whole row could have been staggered to the left like it is on a full size keyboard. I'd rather have one key out of place than the whole row..
Does this make sense or am I crazy.? I can't believe they left this whole row in line with the keys below.
Looks very nice. Better then the Eee.
seriously..
I've got the Aspire One...
Using XP on it?
Well good luck finding compatibilities.
And also comsider the lag.
Opt for Linux instead.
Sure it's heaps better than this 910. =]
Not sure why anyone would want this. I'll keep the xps 13" i have which is much more powerful.
Well of course it's more powerful, if I was paying $700 upwards on a laptop I'd want it to be more powerful than a netbook.
My Vostro 1500 is also way more powerful, but it's a freakin behemoth. One of these would be perfect for when I need something small and light to, say, remotely manage a system when I'm away from my desk.
a 13" xps is small and light. How many computers do you want to keep synced anyways?
my 002 blackbird is faster!
My Lenovo Z61p is faster than your XPS 1330! Course its also way more expensive and prone to breaking down...
Look what I found...
http://search.dell.com/results.aspx?s=gen&c=us&l=en&cs=&k=Inspiron+910&cat=sup
Looks good, but I've gone to an N810 Internet Tablet for my portable needs. (which admittedly aren't great)
When my good 'ol Inspiron B130 dies I'll replace it with one of these perhaps.
Site looks good, Engadget.
I have aspireone and the keyboard beat this to hell.
Finally, can't wait! Yeah the keyboard isn't great, but it sure as heck beats the crappy placement of the Aspire's touchpad buttons. For those crying about why bother with this when you can get an obviously better speced system like the HP or eee 1000h, consider the fact that those two systems cost $200-$300 more. This is a low end machine with a low end price, so don't expect miracles from it.
I don't think the price will be $400, I am guessing it will be $349. Which is unfortunately high for the low end 4 gig SSD 512 meg RAM version. Hopefully that version is 299 and the middle version (8 gig SSD 1 gig RAM) is 349. 16 gig would then be 449 or 499.
Finally! I've never anticipated the release of a gadget as much as this one. I've been waiting for the perfect netbook since the first eee came out and this is the first one to really fit the bill. Sure the keyboard is kinda weird, but that's something I'm sure I'll be able to get used to. It's also a nice bonus that I'll (probably) be able to buy this with Ubuntu preinstalled. Nothing like an excuse to encourage big computer manufacturers to support Linux on their hardware, especially my very favorite distro. and get a kickass netbook to go with it.
No F11 or F12 ... eh, who needs em, right?
My girlfriend just got a Acer Aspire One (512/8gb/linux) and it's really cool. We tried to hold out for this, but she really wanted it for first day of school. The hardware of the Aspire One is top notch, love the two memory slots, and the screen looks great. The keyboard is unfortunately the Canadian Bilingual Keyboard layout, I really don't like it. The Linpus Linux version that comes loaded isn't too bad... it does what she needs for now, (internet, messenger, documents). I've been testing Ubuntu Netbook Remix on VMware... it's pretty much in beta stage as it's really laggy and the boot time sucks. But they confirmed this is just early stages and expect 5-10 second boot times. Most importantly, the interface is really awesome. Any chances the 910 will come with Ubuntu Netbook Remix pre-loaded? Or will it be the standard Ubuntu 8.04 desktop?
Well the price is OK. It’s little cheaper then the Asus Eee PC 901, but the Eee PC comes standard with a 6-cell battery, 1.3 MP cam Bluetooth and 2 speakers in stead of 1. So I think the Dell Mini 9 can’t be called an Eee killer (is there any yet?). I agree with Dell that an SSD drive is a better choice for a netbook then a traditional Hard Disk Drive. See this article about storage capacity issues:
http://www.netbookusers.com/smf/index.php?topic=42.0