Review: Dell Inspiron Mini 9

Not quite.

What's the difference between a baby and a Dell Mini 9? One burps, cries and falls asleep every two to three hours. The other will grow up to be an adult one day.

Actually, to cut to the chase: The Dell Inspiron Mini 9 is a decent, nice-to-look at, easy-to-carry netbook. It works as advertised. The unit looked at in the Test Center lab was pre-loaded with Windows XP, built with an 8 GB SSD, a half-gig of memory and an Intel Atom processor at 1.6 GHz. It rang up a score on Primate Labs' Geekbench 2 of 869 -- putting it on par with other netbooks we've looked at this year.

Using the Test Center's standard battery-life test, which is to turn off all power-saving features and run a video from the hard drive until it shuts down, the Mini 9 ran for 2 hours and 40 minutes before it turned off. The 8.9-inch LCD was fine, as was the small keyboard -- which is a little clunky but, frankly, that's the trade-off you make when you opt for a netbook in the first place. (And, listen, if you can type on a BlackBerry or an iPhone, and see the screens on those devices, you shouldn't have a major protest with the Mini 9's LCD or keyboard.)

It weighed in at just under 2 pounds, 5 ounces.

The Mini 9 grew a little warm after a couple of hours. While the keyboard and touchpad were fine, the bottom of the unit heated up to about 103 degrees -- warmer than feels comfortable. It's not a deal-breaker, though.

The real problem with the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, as is the problem with other netbooks in this class, is that it's not a full PC even though it looks to be in the same species. It's slower. Trying to do more than two things at once -- like type a document on OpenOffice.org while listening to Internet radio -- is really pushing the system's limit. The Mini 9 has a pretty nice, built-in, 1.3-megapixel Webcam. The problem: activating that Webcam on Skype took 11 minutes. That's not a typo: 11 minutes.

Many of us have become spoiled. High-end, dual-core or quad-core systems with 2 GB or 4 GB of RAM allow us the luxury of being inefficient. PCs with those hardware specifications can allow you to have ten applications running at the same time, including a browser with 72 tabs open and music playing. While your boss might think that multitasking like that is efficient, it's really the PC that takes care off all the superfluous memory and other resources that you're consuming.

With netbooks like the Mini 9, you're not allowed to be inefficient. Click on a browser and open two tabs, click open a word processor, and the Mini 9 throws a warning at you that you're out of virtual memory. ("Two applications at a time, Buster, or we're shutting this whole thing down.") So you must learn to be efficient all over again: Open up and allow it to set cookies; make good use of bookmarking and cache in your Web browser; and if you're going to use multimedia, really, keep it to one application at a time.

Dell is now pricing the XP-based Inspiron Mini 9 at $399 (the Ubuntu Linux version is about $50 less.)

The bottom line: the Dell Mini 9, like many netbooks, is great to keep on a nightstand next to your bed, to throw in a bag for an overnight trip, or to carry around on a college or office campus between classes or meetings. It won't replace a notebook. It won't even replace a smartphone. But for one task at a time, it'll work -- even if you have to re-learn how to use a PC.