Mac mini user reviews contest: Win $500 in Mac mini accessories (or $500 in cash)

If we've learned one thing from our year-long adventure over here at Engadget, it's that our readers are really, really smart. Scary smart (and we're not just buttering you all up). We thought about hiring a bunch of folks to review products, but realized that a good number of you know so much about this gear already that we would be better off pulling a Tom Sawyer and asking you—the Engadget reader—to help paint the fence.

For our first "User Review Contest" we're asking Engadget readers who have a Mac mini to write a review of the product. The best review, as judged by the editors of Engadget, will receive over $500 in Mac mini accessories including the Mac mini Skirt or Mac mini Tower, the Kensington Dome Hub, and an external 200GB hard drive—or $500 PayPal cash to spend as you will, however you want! Click for details on how to enter.

Here are the guidelines for the reviews:

1. You must have the product in question (duh!) and you must use your real name when submitting the review (your email will not be made public). Post your review in the comments below. You should probably write out the review somewhere else first and then paste it into our comment form.

2. You must rate the product on each of five categories: Overall, Specs, Design, Usability and Value on a scale of 1 to 10, and provide a justification and explanation for each rating. You may use half points.

Rating System: A 9 or 10 would be one the best products ever ? perhaps the Treo 600 when it first came out. A rating of 7 or 8 would be an OK to good product, like say the iPod shuffle or Treo 650. A 4 to 6 rating is a poor product. Below a four and it means you?ve probably already sent this thing back.

3. Each review must include a section that details the pros and cons of the product.

4. Your overall word count must be between: 350 to 750 words.

5. If you want bonus points, feel free to take photos, screen shots, or videos of the product and link to them in your review. We can?t host all the entrants? media, but if you win we will reprint your review and host the media on our servers. Please note that the protocol for making external links in our comments is to cut and paste the full URL inline, and not to use the usual HTML ?a href? syntax ? if you do, your URL will get munged and not made live. Your plain HTML link will automagically get turned into an actual link by our Blogsmith software. You can use parentheses to set off your link, like so: (http://www.engadget.com)

Have fun with the reviews, be honest, insightful, clever, and intelligent. Please post your review in the comments below. You have exactly 72 hours from now.

Legal stuff: By submitting the review below you agree to let us publish it, but we understand that you own the rights to your work and you can take your review and go sell it to somebody else. Also, you can only enter the contest once.

UPDATE: Contest closed! Give us a few days to judge this one.

UPDATE 2: Really sorry this is taking so long! A lot of worthy entries and we?ve been debating over a winner?it?s hard to pick just one out of so many great reviews.