tuaw.com, April 27, 2009:

"A tweet this afternoon pointed me to a post by Dave "MacSparky" Sparks titled The Netbook Experiment, in which he talked about his disappointment with a Dell mini 9 netbook. Since I was about to send out a tweet to the world at large announcing the sale of my Dell mini 9, I found it fascinating that Sparks had a similar experience to mine.

I wrote about creating a hackintosh (AKA hackb00k) out of a Dell mini 9 in a long post back in October of 2008, and at that time I was fairly impressed with the low cost and capabilities of the device. However, after actually using the mini 9 for six months, I find it almost useless as a "real computer" and have decided that it needs to go. The moral of the story? You definitely get what you pay for, and a $499 computer is not going to be a productivity tool. Even if you delude yourself into thinking that since you're only going to use it for email it will be a worthwhile investment, you're wrong. If you want to know how I came to these conclusions, read on.
My first real work with the mini 9 began in November, when I decided to acclimate myself to its diminutive keyboard by using it during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) to work on a novel. Sure, it was easy to carry, especially in the tailor-made Dell bag. Yes, it had pretty good battery life. It booted quickly with the 16GB SSD inside it. But other than that, it was a total pain to work with.

To begin with, I'm accustomed to using the trackpad on my MacBook Air with multi-touch gestures. After reading how some other hackb00k users had been able to get multi-touch gestures working, I applied the appropriate patches and gave it a try. Sure, it worked for a little bit, and then began to irritate me when the gestures would fail. I decided to use a cheap micro-mouse instead, which meant that two of the USB ports were now filled -- one with the cable for the mouse, and the other for the Sprint wireless broadband dongle that I use when I'm on the road. I suppose I could have used the Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse instead, but it just didn't seem right spending $79 for a mouse for a $499 computer.

Next, I found the keyboard almost unusable. I have relatively small hands, and even my little mitts had difficulty typing on the cramped keyboard of the mini 9. One problem I kept having over and over was trying to type an apostrophe (single quote). Every keyboard I've ever used to touch-type has the apostrophe in the same place -- just to the left of the return key in the home row (ASDF...) of the keyboard. On the mini 9, it was located down two rows near the space bar. Since I have been touch-typing for about 40 years, my finger kept hitting the Dell's enter key every time I wanted to type an apostrophe." [...]

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