I recently purchased a Dell Mini 9n because it was on sale for only $199. This was for a netbook that cost $349 when it shipped half a year ago. It was configured with Ubuntu, 512Mb of RAM, and a 8Gb SSD. I had read some positive reviews for the product, and I wanted to test out the small form factor. After a day of using the netbook, I decided it wasn’t for me because of these reasons.

1. The keyboard’s just not comfortable for me. I remapped the keys and made the up button a shift key, and I swapped the semicolon and apostrophe keys, but I still felt cramped with the keyboard.
2. The screen isn’t big enough. Reading the NY Times website at its default text size is painful. I could increase the size of the text, but I’d prefer not to. Although the screen of an iPod Touch is much smaller, the NY Times can sense it’s a mobile device and adapts its layout. Even if I go to a normal website, I can use the Touch’s multi-touch feature to zoom and expand. I think I might be able to live with a 10-inch screen, but the 9-inch is just too small. I’m very comfortable with the 12-inch size of my G4 iBook.
3. The touchpad is twitchy. It wasn’t smooth scrolling with the pad.
4. The wireless takes some time to connect. I don’t like the 10 second delay after the system wakes up to connect to a wireless AP that’s already set in the preferences. My OS X and Windows XP and Vista machines connect much faster to a wireless AP.

I realize these are all user interface issues, and I can say I wasn’t unhappy with the performance of the Dell Mini 9n since all I was asking of it was basic web browsing. But the user interface issues were too annoying, and in the end I was willing to pay the 15% restocking fee to send the netbook back. Interestingly enough, when I said I wanted to send the netbook back, the customer service representative offered to take $20 off the cost of the system. Another interesting note was that I spoke to 7 people in India before I received my return authorization.

If I did purchase a netbook right now, I think I would go with the Asus 1000HE since it has a larger screen, people seem happy with its keyboard which doesn’t put keys in weird locations or compromise in size too much, and its 6-cell lithium ion battery also lasts at least 8 hours for many people. This would be great for cross country flights that involve a connection. But I’m going to hold off for now on a new netbook since the Nvidia Ion platform looks very promising: http://www.nvidia.com/object/sff_ion.html. I also have a G4 iBook and a HP 17-inch Duo Core Vista notebook that work fine. I don’t travel that much so the portability of a netbook isn’t that important to me. I also have my iPod touch for portable browsing. I would like to see a notebook/netbook using the Ion platform which is the same width and length as my G4, but in a thinner form factor with a battery that lasts at least 6 hours. No optical drive would be needed to keep the form factor thin, and a SSD would be nice for its lower power and silence. I think that should start appearing later on this year.