Inside the Inspiron Mini 9

As most of you know by now, Dell launched the Inspiron Mini 9 netbook yesterday. Jkk has come across the service manual for the unit on Dell’s site.  The manual shows some good internal pictures and there is a lot of talking in the blogosphere right now about how easy it could be to upgrade the unit’s hardware (never a bad thing).

Vicente, a UMPC Portal reader, wants to know whether the SSD in the Mini 9 has 100% high speed flash storage, or if they will pull and Eee and have a small part of the storage be high speed, but the majority of it much slower. I asked netbook guru jkk if he had any insight, and he says it isn’t clear yet. Apparently some of the review units that made their way to some of the larger tech sites don’t all have the same SSD. No one is sure exactly which will ship with the unit so it seems as though we’ll have to wait and see.

Live broadcast from the Everun Note

Creating content couldn’t be simpler. I just had 20 minutes between tasks here so i decided to transmit and record a little video directly on the Everun Note. This whole post has been done while standing up too!

More info on the Everun Note here!

Dell Inspiron Mini 9 is official

A lot of info about Dell’s entry into the netbook market has been uncovered in the last day or two. The Inspiron 910 Mini 9 has gone official a day before Gizmodo’s predicted date. Now we have all the details about the new netbook, and reviews are already up on the nets. Lets have a look, shall we?

Info directly from Dell’s site shows us three model tiers. All models share an 8.9" 1024×600 display and a 1.6GHz Atom N270 CPU and the usual bevy of ports (full specs can be found in the Portal), but they differentiate in RAM, OS, webcam and SSD size. The least in terms of specs and price starts at $349 and comes equipped with 512MB of RAM, no camera, 4GB SSD, and Ubuntu, apparently with a custom Dell interface. The next model up will run you $399 and has 512MB of RAM, 0.3MP webcam, 8GB SSD, and Windows XP Home. The most costly of the three is $449 and has 1GB of RAM, 16GB SSD, 0.3MP webcam, and is also running Windows XP. Keep in mind, these are just pre-configured machines. You can mix and match the different specs (RAM/OS/webcam/SSD) and get exactly what you want. Oh and don’t forget that you can pay an extra $25 for a white model instead of a black one, if you feel so inclined. Buyer beware, none of the models come with Bluetooth, you need to add that yourself (+$20) when you customize the machine.

Strangely enough, Dell is offering ‘Instant Savings’ of $40 and $55 on the middle and top end models respectively; effectively negating any price break for taking the Ubuntu OS. Anyone care to theorize why they would want to get XP machines out the door rather than Ubuntu?

Everun Note unboxing.

Its here. Its small. Its powerful and it, according to my daughter, looks like a Nintendo DS for Daddys! Its the Raon Digital Everun Note that arrived just a few hours ago.

I’m currently setting up for the live session and so far everything is going smoothly. I’ve already run a 7.5mbps WMV HD video, played Unreal Tournament, Skyped and am currently running 3DMark2001. THis little bad boy can really push the bits around! The only thing I’ve found disappointing so far is the optical mouse pointer which doesn’t seem to be working well. Its could be a broken one as the one I have on the original Everun is much nicer. Its not as bad as it sounds as the touchscreen is just wonderful! Anyway, all will be revealed later and in future posts!

YouTube version here. HQ WMV version here. Full specifications, news and gallery through the Everun Note info page.

LaptopMag, UMPCPortal. Live Mini-Notebook Fest!

Well I really don’t know what this could be. LaptopMag have announced a live session starting at 3PM EST (1900 GMT) today where they “showing off a highly anticipated notebook. We are under embargo at this point and cannot reveal what that product is, but it is a juicy one.” Hmm. What could that be. A netbook launching today perhaps?

3PM EST is exactly the time I’ll be going live with another Mini Notebook, the Raon Digital Everun Note so folks, you have to steal your partners laptop and go cross-eyed or choose between cheap, common-in-all-gardens Atom netbook or the most powerful sub-KG notebook in the world! (See what I did there?)

LaptopMag session will be run here.

UMPCPortal session will be run here.

Both starting at 3PM EST, 1900 GMT (although my studio cam will be on before them while I record an unboxing and prepare for the session.)

Everun Note will get extended internal battery

If you’re following the Raon Digital Everun Note (due here in a matter of hours now) then you’ll be aware that there’s an external battery charger/pack and, although this isn’t yet confirmed, a large capacity external battery pack. Mobile users are going to want something a bit more portable than that though so here’s what Raon Digital have come up with. Its a large-capacity internal battery with 45% more juice. It comes with 4 new feet to provide the necessary clearance but from the images below, you can see it only adds 2-3mm extra thickness. If Raon’s battery life figures of 2-3hrs are to believed, the extended battery will take you into the 3-4 hours range. You’ll also have the standard battery as a spare when you buy this so in effect, you end up with a potential 7-hours in under 900gms and total mobile flexibility. Don’t expect the battery to be cheap as, like the rest of this device, it’s pushing the envelope on miniaturization but at least the option is there for those that need it. Planned for shipping in October.

More images in the gallery.

Its these little features that make mobile computing so much easier. External battery chargers, flexible CPU and GPU configurations, desktop-quality processing power. Unlike some of the UMPCs of the past, the Everun Note looks like it could work out well as a 2-3 year investment.

Live session with the Raon Everun Note is planned for 2100 CET (GMT+2) start time here at UMPCPortal/live although the cam is likely to be on while I do the unboxing video so I’ll keep an eye on the chat session there and try and answer questions as I go along.

Dell Inspiron Mini 9 sales flyer exposes prices, details.

From an unknown source, but it looks good to me! A lttle high on price perhaps but that Dell brand-value will carry them through i’m sure.

Full specifications in the portal.

Update: Dell Mini 9 microsite is now live. (U.S.)

Update 2: Its all official now.

N10 caught in the wild - high end netbook with Nvidia graphics

Aving has just posted a report from the Asus World 2008 conference about the Asus N10 netbook/laptop we covered earlier. The N10 looks simply wonderful and there is no mistaking that this is a high-end piece of equipment. What is probably the best thing about this device is that it has an Nvidia GeForce 9300GS graphics card. Try finding that on another netbook! Other previously unknown specifications include a 320GB harddrive, 2GB of RAM, LED backlit 10″ screen and an Intel N270 (Atom) processor. Add this to the previously known features (HDMI, Altec Lansing speakers, fingerprint reader) and you have one powerful machine. And it looks great too..my new favorite netbook. Let’s just hope the battery life is good. More pictures over at Aving.net.

Chippy writes: Techticker reports that it will be officially announced on the 13th (Sat?) and will have a price of $1140 and a 6-cell battery good enough for 6+hours.  This is Atom breaking out of its cage and Intel and notebook manufacturers definitely won’t be happy to see it but its definately going to happen. Users are realising that they prefer good-value, small form-factor and long battery life more than anything. It really wont suprise me to see the average size on notebooks come right down with users being happy with 10-12″ models with long battery life as a result of the netbook craze. If Atom is good enough for that then Intel and traditional laptop sales will suffer.

Raon Everun Note gets reviewed

Jenn from Pocketables.net has found an early review of the highly the anticipated Everun Note that is due to be in Chippy’s hands in the near future. If you can’t wait until then, test your luck with an online translator and see how much of the Korean review that you can understand. If you don’t want to wade through inaccurate computer generated translations, sit tight, Chippy will run the Everun Note through the paces as soon as he has its hands on it! In the mean time you can at least look at the pictures: (part 1, part 2).

Everun Note Touchscreen demo

Here is a video short video showing some early touchscreen action on the upcoming Everun Note. The user in the video is using the touchscreen to rotate the various virtual desktops that are presented on a 3D cube within the Sabayon Linux OS. It all looks really smooth even through the YouTube video. Keep your eyes peeled here on UMPC Portal, Chippy will have one of these soon.

Thanks overthrow

Google Chrome Beta. Initial tests not good for UMPC users.

What’s the most important browser feature for UMPC and Tablet users? Touch screen scrolling. Grab and Drag is the name of the game and if I can’t have that feature on my browser, I’m losing a ton of capability.

That’s why I’m disappointed with Google Chrome, the new browser from Google. It works well on the desktop with fast speeds and a great ‘most visited’ overview page but on a UMPC its nowhere near as useful as Firefox 3.

I’ll be testing it further over the next day or so but I’m finding it difficult to tear myself away from Firefox 3.

Other notes:

• No full-screen.
• No grab and drag.
• Text zoom only
• Fast
• Per tab processes should help with page error lock-ups.
• Overview feature very nice.
• Have spotted an Ajax error with the product database here
• Javascript handling seems to be fast
• Incognito mode will be good for certain people!!

Anybody else done tests yet?

Everun Note availability and info from Manual.

Following on from yesterdays shockingly popular (read: Almost took my site out at one point) post about the Everun Note, I’ve got some new information pertaining to availability and have a copy of the manual that exposes some good information.

The first shipments should go out on Sept 19th with resellers being able to get them to customers the following week. 4-weeks to wait if you’re interested in this one. I have only heard from one reseller so far (Mobilx) but I’m sure there will be others. [Resellers. If you're going to stock this, I'll be happy to relay the information in the official Raon Digital forum we have here.]

I’ve also got a copy of the manual which I’m not going to post just yet as I haven’t been able to check if its final but there are a few interesting items in it that I will air. The first thing that caught my eye was some information about how to use Avivo which is ATI’s hardware accelerated video engine. They include a video conversion tool which I assume just uses the hardware-accelerated decoding features of the GPU but this is something I had not considered before, its got hardware video acceleration for MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and WMV. Its good and bad news because it means that video performance will be top-notch [Raon provide details of how to enable the hardware encoding in KMPlayer] but it means that any battery life figures for video playback might not have any relevance to browsing use. Its a shame there’s no HDMI output on the Everun Note as this is going be one amazing PMP. [article continues...]

M912V disassembled.

It didn’t take long for the people over at Mobile01 to strip down the newly-available M912V! If this is your bag, then take a look. Its an easy device to take apart but for most things, you only need to remove the access panel on the back. At least the keyboard should be easy to change as I believe its the same as an Eee PC keyboard. (Country-specific keyboard mods should be possible.)

Thanks, Itechnews.

Eee 701 going, going… (Price drops)

The Eee PC 701 has hit the sub 200-Euro mark in Europe now and I suspect many resellers are looking to move on to the next best thing. 800×480 is officially out of fasion. But not useless, and at these prices low prices you can kit the whole family out with one for the new season. Expansys have the 701 surf (4G, Linux, no cam) available for under 160 pounds! Here’s the promo info I got by email earlier today.

New Lower Price on the ASUS Eee PC 701 Surf – only £158.99 inc VAT

eXpansys have reduced the price of the ASUS Eee 701 [aff] to an amazing £158.99 inc VAT. Ideal for students going back to college or university this is one of the smallest and lightest ultra-portables ever made. Not that this mini laptop is just for students, it’s hardwearing and a real work horse making it ideal for business. Available in two colours, you can choose between the stylish white and the sophisticated black.

Check the specs in our database here.

ARM Cortex Browsing Test shows the Full Internet Experience.

Here’s another one of those ‘we can beat Atom’ tests where the fine detail of the result is irrelevant. The important thing here is that, like the VIA Nano comparison test, significant, market-changing progress has been made.

I’ve been talking about ARM’s Cortex A8 for a while now and keeping an eye on it in terms of its suitability for Mobile Internet Devices. Its a powerful computing core and people like Ti are using it to build very small, power-efficient media and Internet-capable platforms. Apart from Pandora, we’ve seen it being promoted for use in OHA Android phones and even for netbooks.

But how fast is the Cortex A8? How fast would Firefox 3 run on a Cortex-based Android smartphone? And how accurate would it be? Intel keep pusing the ‘real internet’ and about how many errors you’ll find with smartphone browsers but when you’re running Firefox 3 on both platforms, the difference disappears. Intel also talking about speeds but when the processing power is the same on both hardware, that difference disappears too. ARM’s partners have already fought back against the Intel Atom machine a few times in the past (Nvidia here and here) but this video strikes right at the heart of Atom/Moblin. It shows Firefox 3 running at impressive speeds. Forget the normalised comparison at the end of the video, any browser that can average under 10 seconds per page as shown in this demo is going to be good enough for almost everyone. Its twice as fast as previous ARM-based devices and completely removes the 9-second disadvantage that I’ve talked about before. [see video below]