Dell Inspiron Mini 9 Reviewed: Refining the Netbook Market

Performance & Battery Life

The Inspiron Mini 9 is designed to be used as an appliance, a box that can give you access to email, the web and applications. It happens to be a computer, but that's not the focus. Performance in any of its individual tasks such as web browsing or document editing is acceptable on the Mini. The Atom processor is fast enough and with 1GB of memory you can keep a couple of applications active without running into any slowdown.

Boot time is the only area where the Mini really falls short compared to the ASUS Eee PC 901. While the 901 can start from an off state and take you into its Xandros OS in 27 seconds, the Mini needs 40 to do the same. I'm not sure if this is an Ubuntu issue or a Mini hardware/BIOS thing at this point.

While the Eee PC 901 has a 6-cell battery (48WHr), Dell cut costs by using a 4-cell 32WHr battery in the Inspiron Mini 9. I scripted a quick web/MP3 playback test, similar to what I’ve used in some of our Mac coverage. With the display set to never shut off (simulating a real browsing scenario), looping through a bunch of locally stored MP3s, I had both the Eee PC 901 and the Inspiron Mini surf through a bunch of webpages (over the local WiFi network) designed to forward to one another after pausing for 20 seconds (simulating "reading time"). The web pages were predominantly text and images, there was no Flash but the system isn't given any breaks other than the 20 second pause between pages - for a netbook, this is pretty much a torture test.

Dell claims that the Inspiron Mini should be good for over four hours of battery life, running the test I just described it ran for 178 minutes, just two minutes shy of the 3 hour mark. If you lighten your load I'd expect that hitting 4 hours could be a reality, but for all intents and purposes I'd expect the Mini to be good for 3 - 4 hours of usage.

ASUS' Eee PC 901 did a bit better as you'd expect; with 50% more battery capacity, the Eee PC lasted for 287 minutes , nearly 5 hours of continuous use. Here's where positioning really comes into play though.

I honestly couldn't find myself using either notebook all day, they aren't ergonomic enough and they are still far from pleasurable to type on. Dell views the Inspiron Mini much like I do the iPhone, it's a device to carry with you when you're out to a quick meeting, class, lunch, etc... and happen to be away from your more, um, normal sized computers. If you use it as intended, I believe Dell's battery life tradeoff is a nonissue. If the Inspiron Mini is going to be more of a constant-use machine for you however, the longer battery life of the Eee PC may tempt you away from the Mini's stunning good looks.