Posted 02/27/09 at 10:11:54 AM by Paul Lilly

For the most part, netbooks have nipped at the heels of standard notebooks in terms of price, with some models running upwards for $500. Consumers have been willing to pay the premium for an ultra-portable, low-power PC, but weren't these things supposed to ultra-affordable, too?

Dell says yes, who now offers the Inspiron Mini 9n for just shy of two C-notes. On the outside, the Mini 9n comes with a glossy 8.9-inch LED display with a 1024x600 resolution and 'Obsidian Black' chassis. Underneath the hood sits a familiar Intel Atom N270 processor (1.6GHz, 512KB cache, 533MHz frontside bus), 512MB of DDR2-533, a 4GB SSD, Intel GMA 950 graphics, WiFi, and Ubuntu 8.04.1 pre-installed.

For a little more oomph, the standard Mini 9 runs $100 more and trades in Ubuntu for Windows XP, beefs up the RAM to 1GB, and doubles the SSD storage capacity to 8GB.

The customizable Insprion Mini 9n starts at $199.

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