I always wanted to get the Sony TZ or something similar, but it just seemed to expensive.
I need a laptop for travel. Something with a good battery life, very lightweight, and I really would like to have UMTS built in.
The dell seems to have all that. Even thought the harddrive is small, I can always pick up a new SSD at Newegg or Tiger direct and it has XP - my OS of choice.
Is there anything negative about it?

Most of us were excited when Dell leaked the Mini 9, and we saw pictures of it. When it was announced, most of us yawned, because of the SSD only option.

Take a look at the Lenovo S10, the version with the 160G hard drive. It has an express card slot, so you can add whatever you want to add. Also, the memory and hard drives are user accessable through a panel on the bottom.

The only downside to the S10 is that the Fn and Cntrl keys are swapped from their normal location, and there's no software method to change that, since the Fn key is handled by the keyboard hw. My workaround is to change Caps Lock to Control using the windows registry method. Other than that one thing, it's great for what it is. (I'm pretty sure that all Lenovo keyboards have that same thing, so it isn't just an S10 issue.)

-David

I was able to get a Mini 9 (Ubuntu version) for $99 with the purchase of a Studio 15. The only option I added was Bluetooth, so it has the stock 512MB RAM, 4 GB SSD, and no web cam. The Ubuntu version comes stocked with a decent selection of apps, with Skype being the only thing I want to add for now.

Battery life is around 4 hours, the screen is nice, and performance is decent. I bought it to take on vacation, mileage runs, to Starbucks/Panera, etc, and it fits my needs quite well. With a keyboard and 9" screen, it's far more practical than my Nokia N800 that has been my lightweight travel Internet access device in the past.

Before I got it for $99, I'm not sure I would have paid the full price of $349 for it. Now that I have it, I think the $349 is a fair price.

it's one of the better built netbooks out there and coming from Dell at that. Acer's the #1 in the market though along w/ Asus.

I have the Mini 9 and love it! Keep in mind that the SSD drive is what gets you the increased battery life; up to four hours. It's a trade-off I can live with. By simply purchasing a 16 or 32 GB SD card you can overcome the smallish SSD drive. I bought this machine primarily for overseas travel. I use it for Internet, watching videos on long flights, connecting to my Slingbox, and storing documents. The overall build is excellent very solid and compact. If you purchase the version with XP installed, you can significantly increase system performance by decompressing the SSD drive.

Wirelessly posted (Blackberry 8820: Opera/9.50 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/4.1.11355/574; U; en))

Does the s10 have a built in umts modem?

That is very important to me including for a netbook.

I was looking at dixions tax free in lhr t5.
Looks like the only cheap laptop with umts is the dell mini 9

is there anything in this size/price range with a DVD player ?

would be nice to have WiFi, DVD player and Skype in a small sub-notebook

Rally

There's not enough room.
The motherboards take up the bulk of the internal space. Maybe later, not now.
A lot of the 12.1" laptops don't have DVD drives either (a weight issue as well as one of space).

I think this defeats the purpose of the netbook in the first place- small, lightweight, used for internet access and similar sorts of behaviors. It's the kind of thing meant to be carried when traipsing about. Perhaps a netbook and a separate, small, DVD player. True, it will be one more thing to carry on the plane, but when bopping around town and wanting the small netbook for wifi or broadband access, the DVD player stays at home.

Cheers.

I have a little portable dvd player, thats why I asked ,

I guess I could put the movies on a usb drive,,,,,

or can I ? will that work ?

Rally

Yea, it'll work. Or put 'em on SD cards and get a fast SD card reader.

All of the netbooks have built-in SD card support as far as I know.

No, but as I mentioned in my reply, the S10 has an express card slot.

-David

Id rather have it all built in

My T60p is the same way. The reason behind this is in low light conditions all you need to do to turn on the ThinkLight (LED at the top of the screen that illuminates the keyboard) is locate the Fn key on the lower left and the PgUp key on the upper right.

Took a bit of getting used to at first, but to me at least, it’s a nice feature.