One of the world's biggest hardware manufacturers, Dell couldn't resist the temptation to join the netbook fray.  

Its first attempt has stuck with the Inspiron brand name used on its other notebooks, but the Mini 9 is very much an ultra-portable offering, with its 8.9'' screen making it something of a direct competitor of the Asus Eee PC 901.

Dell hasn't left its old habits behind though, and, as with all of its products, you can customize the Mini 9, although there are fewer options than with its desktop and notebook computers.

Handling & Connectivity
Taken in the round, the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 has a serious look: a lot of netbooks look more like toys than computers, but that definitely isn't the case here.  

A glossy case complements the glossy screen (see box, right).  

Like with the Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Mini, the individual keys on the keyboard are very small--this time just 1.3 cm across.  Although that's a mere 2 mm smaller than Asus' keys, the difference really makes itself felt when you're typing.

What's more, some of the keys on the right hand side have been slimmed down so they're only one centimeter across: look  how tiny the right shift is, for instance, next to the arrow keys in this shot of our AZERTY test model.

Typical webcam shot

Given the general dimensions of this netbook, the touchpad is pretty huge, and, without quite matching the surface area of a 10'' netbook, it's easily big enough to be practical.

The left and right mouse buttons, directly underneath the touchpad, feel a little soft to the touch, but that's better than a loud click if you need to use your netbook in a quiet environment.

Using the webcam, you're likely to look a little blurry, and the best step is to use the advanced options to turn up the brightness.   A microphone included next to the keyboard gives more promising results and your voice sounds realistic in VOIP calls.

When it comes to the sound from the internal speakers, though, things are less satisfactory, and even with the volume at maximum, you can hardly watch a movie on your computer.  Once again, we can only recommend you invest in some headphones.

Along each side of the netbook, all of the usual connectivity options are there: 3 USB ports, one Ethernet port, a VGA output, a pair of mini-jacks and a memory card reader.

If you want to open it up, you'll find an SSD drive managed by STEC and a RAM slot prefilled with 1 GB.

Microphone and Headphone mini-jacks	2 USB ports and power
VGA, RJ45	Webcam

Processor Power
The Inspiron Mini 9 uses the classic netbook configuration of an Intel Atom processor and flash memory.  

Between them, they give excellent data transfer speeds when it comes to reading.  Launching applications is very quick, and booting the whole computer only takes 35 seconds under Windows XP.  

Writing data is a lot slower, though, and copying our 6 GB test file onto the SSD drive took 22 minutes, as opposed to 5 minutes on the Samsung NC10, which uses a 'conventional' hard drive.

Going in the other direction--reading from the SSD drive to copy onto an external hard drive) only requited 5 minutes, demonstrating once again the imbalance between read and write speeds on this hardware.

When it came to putting the Intel Atom processor through its pace, complex operations like file compression or photo editing took between two and three times as long as they would using an equivalent dual-core CPU in a regular computer.

As for video, not only do you have the problem that netbooks generally aren't powerful enough to handle high resolution video, but with just 16 GB of flash memory to play with, you'll not have a lot of room.

Battery Life & Portability
This machine weights exactly one kilo--the same as a regular bag of flour.  Without repeating what we've already said about netbooks plenty of times, that really is very light.

In terms of battery life, Dell did pretty well on our standard test, lasting the course for 3 hours 10 minutes of continuous video with the sound via the headphones and brightness set to 100 cd/m².  It's still a long way behind the five hours managed by its direct competitor, the Asus 901.

The charger rivals the one Hercules supplies with the eCAFE for the crown of the lightest on the market, at just 180 grams, and both look more like they belong to a mobile phone than a computer.