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 September 3rd 2008 3:01AM
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