Remember how Dell promised to let you pick up a shiny new Inspiron Mini 9 netbook for just $99 with the purchase a full fledged notebook? Knocking $250 off the price of the netbook sounds like a pretty good deal, especially when you get two notebooks almost for the price of one, right? Well, maybe not. Engadget did a little digging and discovered that Dell is kind of, sort of increasing the price of the old school notebooks in order to subsidize the deal.

Here’s how it works. Say you want to pick up a Dell Studio 15 laptop. You can visit the Dell Fall Deals page where you’ll find the laptop selling for $699. Granted, this is a limited time promotion, not the list price. But still, $699. But if you go to the page that promises you a $99 Inspiron Mini with purchase, you’ll find a nearly identical Studio 15 configuration for $1098. Do the math and you’ll discover that you could wind up paying more to get the cheap Mini than you would if you just paid full price for the Mini and got the Studio 15 from the Fall Deals page.

While American customers have already been told that they won’t be able to get their hands on an MSI Wind laptop running SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop anytime soon, MSI has promised to make a Linux version of the company’s popular netbook available in other parts of the world. But if you’ve been waiting (im)patiently for this model to show up, you might have to wait a little longer. German news site Heise Online reports that there’s been a recall of some Linux-based Wind laptops due to problems with the disc image used to load the computers.

What kinds of problems? It looks like someone in the MSI factory was using a machine to store family photos and download copyrighted videos including screeners of current movies. And somehow those files wound up on the computers being sent out to customers. So as Engadget suggests, if you happen to be one of the lucky few who have already received an MSI Wind running Linux you should either search around and delete any large files that might be taking up unnecessary space on your hard drive, or sit back, relax, and enjoy the movies.

Following Kevin Tofel’s lead, I decided to run two sets of benchmarks on my Asus Eee PC 1000H this week. First up, I used Battery Eater Pro to gauge the computer’s battery life.

I put the Eee PC 1000H in power saving mode and started the test before going to bed the other night. When I woke up in the morning and rebooted my system, the program told me that the battery was virtually dead after 265 minutes or about 4.4 hours. If that seems a bit low for a 6 cell battery and an Intel Atom CPU, keep in mind the fact that Battery Eater Pro is designed to put a bit of stress on your system. Under real world conditions, I’ve been getting somewhere between 5 and 6 hours of battery life.

I also ran CrystalMark R3 to get some CPU, Memory, and hard drive benchmarks. As expected, the results weren’t very far off from those Kevin recorded on his MSI Wind laptop. The two notebooks feature very similar hardware. You can see a more complete pictures of my results after the break.

Kevin and I plan to meet up this weekend and compare the two notebooks in person, so we can tell you what really makes one stand out from the other. My guess is that there won’t necessarily be a clear winner. The Eee PC 1000H comes with 802.11n and a multi-touch trackpad, but weighs half a pound more than the MSI Wind. The Wind also has a larger right-shift key which is a deal-breaker for Kevin, but not for me.

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A lot of folks (myself included) have pointed out that you can get an Acer Aspire One laptop with 1GB of RAM and an 8GB SSD for $20 less than the cheapest Dell Inspiron Mini 9. But Kevin Tofel of jkOnTheRun makes an interesting point - the Dell netbook may include a faster SSD module.

It appears that Dell is using a solid state disk from STEC which is capable of up to 85 MBps read speeds and 25 MBps write speeds, which means that it should be 2-3 times faster than the SSD in the Acer Aspire One.

Kevin also makes an educated guess that the SSD is a PCI Express card which could be easily upgraded. While Dell is only offering 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB options, STEC also makes a 32GB module which means Dell could release a system with a additional storage capacity later.

Does this mean the Dell Inspiron Mini is really a better deal than the Acer Aspire One? That depends on your needs — and on how the netbook performs in real world tests. Until I see someone post some benchmarks or perform some side by side comparisons, I’m withholding judgment. But the news is promising.

Acer could ship as many as 2 million Aspire One laptops by the end of the quarter, according to DigiTimes. The company is on track to ship as many as million netbooks this month in the US, Europe, Asia, and emerging markets like India.

Acer is also reportedly planning to release netbooks with support for 3G wireless data connetions, which could give the company a bit of a boost — especially if mobile carriers start to subsidize the price of the computer.

Many netbook enthusiasts seemed mildly disappointed with yesterday’s announcement that the base model Dell Inspiron Mini 9 will come with less memory than the cheapest Acer Aspire One while costing more. That makes the Acer Aspire One, with its $329 starting price, the cheapest ultraportable laptop available with an Intel Atom CPU.

via Eee PC.net

If you want an Asus Eee PC 1000H or an MSI Wind with a 6 cell battery, you’ll have to pony up about $550. For about $400 you can get a Lenovo IdeaPad S10, but it’ll ship with a 3 cell battery. And that means that Acer is the first PC maker to offer a netbook with a 6 cell battery, 8.9 inch display and 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU for under $400.

Amazon is taking orders for the Aspire One for $399.95. This version also ships with a 160GB HDD and Windows XP, which means you won’t be saddled with the slow SSD that plagues the Linux version of the Aspire One.

via Engadget

European mobile carrier Vodafone has announced plans to sell Dell Inspiron Mini 9 laptop’s bundled with 3G wireless modems. The laptops will be available for purchase at Vodafone stores throughout Europe and online.

The laptop should be available from Vodafone (or directly from Dell) in late September. There’s no word on exactly how much Vodafone will charge for the netbook. There’s been a lot of speculation that we could see wireless providers subsidize the cost of cheap netbooks like the Inspiron Mini 9 much as they do with cellphones. Buy into a multi-year contract and get a cheap or free computer.

In the UK, Carphone Warehouse is already offering a free Elonex Webbook with the purchase of a data plan.

thanks Martyn!

According to an Intel product roadmap posted by Japanese site PC Watch, the chip maker plans to release its next generation version of the low power Atom CPU in the third quarter of 2009.

There aren’t a ton of details available at the moment, but it looks like the new chips will come in single and dual core flavors and continue to use hyperthreading, which means your operating system will likely report 2 or 4 processors. You will not, however, see the kind of performance boost you would expect from a true quad-core CPU, but hyperthreading does provide a small performance bump when running some applications.

The current generation Atom CPU uses a single core chip with hyperthreading and does seem to offer pretty decent performance without putting much strain on your battery. Unfortunately the roadmap doesn’t say anything about the power draw of the new chips, so I don’t know if you’ll take a battery life hit along with the promised performance increase.

[via Engadget and Register Hardware]

If you’re the sort of person who cares more about what a PC looks like on the inside than the outside, you typically have to wait for some eager hacker to buy one and rip it apart (or if you’re lucky, the FCC will publish some photos before the computer is even released). But while the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 isn’t expected to ship for a few more weeks, Dell has published a few photos of the device’s insides in its online service manual.

It looks like it should be pretty easy to upgrade the RAM, swap out the Intel SSD for a faster module, and switch out the SIM card if you get a model with a 3G modem. The manual also includes handy instructions for flashing the system BIOS, replacing the system coin-cell battery, and even replacing a bad power button board.

[via jkkmobile]

While OLPC, Intel, Asus, Acer, Dell, and everyone else in the cheap ultraportable space continue to try to produce a $100, it looks like China’s HiVision has managed to pull it off. The HiVision NB0700 is a computer with a 7 inch, 800 x 480 pixel display, WiFi support, and a price tag as low as $98.

Don’t expect the NB0700 to win any design or speed awards. The PC has a sluggish 400MHz MIPS CPU, 1GB of solid state memory and 64MB or 128MB of RAM. It’s designed to run a custom version of Linux or Windows CE and has an SDHC card reader and 3 USB ports. It should be available next month. 

It runs some basic office and internet applications including AbiWord and Firefox.

You can check out a video after the break.

[via Eeextra and TechVideoBlog]

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After taking a brief hiatus from shelves everywhere, it looks like the version of the MSI Wind laptop with the 6 cell battery is starting to reappear. Or at least the version with the pink cover is anyway.

Whether you’re naturally drawn to pink or you just think your laptop is less likely to be stolen when you leave it on a table and run to the Starbucks restroom if its pink (you’re probably wrong, by the way), you can now get yourself a pink, 6 cell MSI Wind for $549 from Newegg.

[via Engadget]

Dell isn’t making a big deal out of the fact that the newly launched Inspiron Mini 9 laptop will support 3G wireless networks. But it will. Dell Senior Product Line Manager John New tells Laptop Magazine that by the end of the year the company will launch a version of the Inspiron Mini with a 3G modem. It’s possible this device could be sold by US mobile carriers who may even subsidize the price of the device by locking customers into wireless contract.

While I’d read early reports saying the Inspiron Mini would support WiMax, New says Dell has no plans to add WiMax support at the moment.

One other interesting revelation is that Dell currently has no plans to release a higher capacity battery for the Inspiron Mini 9. The included 4 cell battery is a bit more powerful than the 3 cell batteries shipping with most netbooks. And it appears that you can get a good 3 to 3.5 hours of battery life out of it. So while Dell may eventually produce a 6 cell or larger battery, right now the company plans to stick with the cheaper 4 cell model.

While Laptop Magazine was busy reviewing the Linux version of the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, PC World got to spend some time with a Windows XP model. While the 8GB SSD wasn’t large enough to hold the magazine’s benchmarking tools, the review states that the machine was able to boot Windows in 30 seconds, load Microsoft Works in 8 seconds, and copy 77MB of data in about 7 seconds.

The battery also lasted about 3 and a half hours, which is about twenty minutes longer than the Linux model got in Laptop Magazine’s tests. It’s not clear if the difference is solely due to the operating systems or if the two magazines stressed the battery in different ways.

The OLPC project is resurrecting its “give one, get one” program that allows end users in developed countries to purchase the XO laptop which is designed for children in developing nations. The idea is that you pay about twice the cost of an XO and you get one while another is donated to a young person.

Last year the price tag was $399 and you could order directly through the OLPC web site. This year Amazon will be handling the sales. It’s not clear if the price will be higher or lower this year. On the one hand, production costs have probably come down a bit. On the other hand, OLPC is expected to release a version of the XO laptop that runs both Linux and Windows XP in the next month or two. So you might be able to pay a few bucks extra to get a dual boot XO.

Joanna Stern has been able to spend some quality time with the new Dell Inspiron Mini 9 mini-notebook and she’s posted a thorough review over at Laptop Magazine. In general, she seems pretty happy with the PC for the price. She reviewed a Linux unit with 1GB of RAM and says the custom version of Ubuntu 8.04 Netbook Remix with the Dell program launcher is probably the best version of Linux she’d ever used on a netbook. Here are a few more things I learned from the review:

• The notebook weighs less than 2.3 pounds, and the tiny battery charger weighs just another .3 pounds, which makes it easy to carry with you. It looks a lot like the charger that came with the Eee PC 701 which was notoriously slow at actually charging a battery. Stern says she hasn’t measured the charge time of the Inspiron Mini 9 yet, but she will soon.
• The computer has a glossy screen, but isn’t particularly prone to glare.
• The speakers are on the bezel below the screen and are reasonably loud for netbook speakers
• The keyboard is on the small side, but still touch typable. As expected, there are no dedicated function keys. Rather, you have to hit the Fn button plus another key to replicate their umm… functions. The right shift key is also awkwardly placed, which is nearly par for the course these days.
• Stern says the laptop gets hot during use, with the keyboard going up to 100 degrees, the bottom of the PC measuring 108 degrees, and the touchpad hitting 92. But she had a pre-production unit and Dell says some of the heat issues have been addressed.
• Overall battery life? About 3 hours and 12 minutes with WiFi on.

Make sure to check out the full Laptop Magazine review for a video hands on and a ton of pictures. So what do you think? Does Dell offer enough advantages over the $329 Acer Aspire One to be worth a few bucks more?