Move over "$100" Laptop...

Well today my dell mini 9 has arrived. I could not be happier. It comes with Win XP SP3, 16GB Solid State HD, integrated webcam, wifi, Bluetooth, 1.6 GB Processor and 1GB of RAM. I swapped out the 1 GB Ram for 2GB immediately. Even with the upgrades it was less than $500. It is extremely portable, durable and contains no moving parts. The Mini 9 comes with an expandable SD slot. I bought a 16GB SD card but I have not used it. 16GB is a lot of space, when you consider that you will not be using it for games, music and videos. I’ve installed 10 full applications and I still have plenty of room to spare.
Instantly I saw the potential for education. Forget about the XO, The Dell Mini 9 offers a solution for school districts trying to achieve 1:1 computing at an affordable price. The Dell Mini 9 offers everything a student would need for the classroom, short of the software (Open Office runs great on it, even Office 2007 runs well too).
Despite the good, the Mini 9 has some drawbacks; it does not have a CD Rom. You can attach one separately, but it is not built in. In addition, the keyboard has made some compromises. The “F1-Ff8” keys are now part of the function button and “F9-F12” are nonexistent. All of the keys have been made smaller but certain keys have been made smaller than others. “Right Shift” is smaller than a standard keyboard key and the ‘ “ key (quote/apostrophe key) has been moved to next to the space bar. These changes take some getting used to, but the sacrifices made for portability outweigh the negative.
I was especially impressed with the webcam. I was expecting a cell phone type webcam with a choppy video and it worked smooth on recording and on Skype. The Dell Mini 9 is truly a wonderful buy and a great computer on the go if your laptop is too big and your phone/blackberry is too small.