First thoughts on the Dell Mini 9

After Alt.net I had thought getting an ultra light notebook was a good idea. At most conference I need to browser, blog and read email; I don’t need to carry around a full development desktop replacement laptop.

Whilst at ReMix I had enough of the old battery in my Acer laptop, so just before it ran out of juice again I ordered a Dell Mini 9, which was actually cheaper than my HTC phone! Today it arrived, a lot sooner than I was expecting, Dell has said it would be next month.

My first thoughts? Well the keyboard is small, typing is an interesting experience as I type this post. Also I would like a disk activity light; during the XP setup there a good period when I was not sure what was going on, a flickering led is always reassuring.

Other than these minor gripes it seem very good, it is light, the battery life seem as advertised and it is fast enough for Office 2007 (so I can use it for presentations) and messing around development (I popped on C#  Express but there is disk space left for VS2008 if I needed it).

I will report further when I have lived with it a while.