This past X-Mas Santa brought me a netbook for being such a “good'” boy (developer). After much deliberation both Santa and I settled on the Dell Mini 9. No one netbook was perfect in my opinion, but the Mini was the choice I went with.
The Good: The device is SMALL, it is truly a toss around laptop (I have had it on the beach, the yard, planes, and to the chagrin of my wife the bed). I immediately upgraded my mini to 2GB RAM and installed XP PRO. The device is plenty snappy; even when running multiple applications. The screen is sharp, with the built in memory card reader it’s a great travel companion when you want to watch moves on the plane. It’s even come in handy while onsite with clients allowing me to RDP into servers and run SQL statements from remote locations with in the building.
The Bad: Do not plan on writing war and peace with this device, you will not be happy. The keyboard is small and the layout leaves a good deal to be desired. The device could have been build a little more solid, after playing with a friends HP Mini, I certainly consider the Dell mini the cheaper feeling product.
The mini is not, in my opinion, a good choice for your primary laptop, it just can’t deliver from a typing perspective and the screen is a little too small once you’ve been spoiled with larger resolution displays. It is great as a second laptop; however, this does come with a dilemma “How do you keep your data synchronized between primary and secondary machine”. I use a couple different programs to keep my data synchronized: MS One Note and Groove. Now let me first state that I don’t keep everything synchronized, since I’m using this device as a “secondary” laptop, it doesn’t need to have everything. I just want my latest docs and my most recent notes. Groove and OneNote suffice for synchronizing this sort of information.
Already the new netbooks seem to have better keyboards, more power and slightly larger displays. With pending release Windows 7 this area of the market should be extremely interesting to watch. I’m sure in the next 6 months there will be several more machines for us all to covet.