Would You Believe: a $99.00 Dell Notebook?

The Deal

Yes, it’s true: in a three-day special sale, Dell is offering its newly unveiled Inspiron Mini 9 at a price point starting at USD $99.00.

The Rub

The catch: you must buy another Dell notebook, albeit also at a discount. Thus, you end paying somewhere between $1,200 and $2,400 for two notebooks.

This special promotion is called the “Dell 3-Day Laptop Sale“. You have to select and configure one of the Studio or XPS notebooks listed as available under the sale terms, and then the Inspiron Mini 9 will be available as an “accessory” during the build configuration procedure for your Studio/XPS notebook (see the second tab panel?):

The Play

Now, to demonstrate a XPS M1330 selection (without any customizations beyond the default configuration) and its accompanying Inspiron Mini 9 “accessory”, here’s a typical build configuration review panel screen:

A few important details here:

• Note the price: without the $347 discount for the XPS M1330, the total price of the default XPS M1330 with a spec’ed Inspiron Mini 9 (resembling the Ubuntu-based Inspiron 910u) is $1,790. Imagine if you’d decided to customize the XPS M1330!
• Note the customizations I applied to the Mini 9:
  • The 1.3 megapixel webcam;
  • The 16 GB SSD (instead of the default 4 GB SSD);
  • Built-in Bluetooth 2.1 (instead of NO Bluetooth!);
  • and 1 GB DDR2 RAM (instead of 512 MB RAM).
• Note that this is for an Ubuntu-based Mini 9… there was no option to switch to the Windows XP Home Edition that you could opt for, if you chose to order the Inspiron Mini 9 by itself.
• Note the preliminary ship date.

The Verdict

If you’ve got some extra bucks to burn to try this deal out, I’d say you should go for it, especially if you’re already in the market for a new Dell-manufactured notebook. Spending at least an extra $99 to try out Dell’s attempt to enter the mini-notebook arena may be worth it.

On the other hand, there are plenty of other computers and devices out there that may interest you, and which may provide greater utility to you. So, do you need a new Windows-based “main” notebook and have a bit of leftover time-and-effort to try out something from a vendor that desperately needs to make its mark in the realm of innovation (and with more than 10 years of lagging behind)?

Tagged as: Dell, Inspiron, Linux, mini-notebook, notebook, sub-notebook, Ubuntu