Welcome to Tech Cast Reviews. In this video, I’m going be taking a look at the new Dell Inspiron Mini 9 Netbook with Vodafone 3G access.
Okay, so let’s take a look at what’s actually inside this particular netbook. Now, powering this actual unit is an Intel Atom 1.63GHz processor backed by one gigabyte of RAM. Now, for what this is actually designed for, email, internet connectivity, messaging, that kind of thing. It’s going to plan for it. You also got linking by SSD drive, three USB connections, a VJ connection and your running Windows XP Home Edition so it’s packed three of course so you’re going to get quite smooth browsing experience on here, no hold ups with Vista Ethernet there.
Now, you’ve got plenty of connectivity as well so you’ve got Bluetooth connectivity, you’ve got wireless connectivity and you’ve also got the 3G modem data access. Now, this one’s provided by Vodafone in this instance and that can provide up to 7.2MB per second of download speed in up to 2MB per second upload speed. Now, it’s based on a contract tariff which will look at in a seconds and the whole unit anyway is 990grams so under one kilogram of this whole unit and it’s actually still surprisingly very sturdy despite its 8.9-inch kind of display size.
The weight is nothing to it really, very light in weight, very sturdy, very portable in terms of its design and not to thick either. It’s very slim under its profile. In the bezel of the display, you’ve got a digital camera for recording video or taking pictures. The keyboard itself, quite small, you may want to spend too much time working on this but again for basic email, internet usage, it would be perfectly fine for that so that’s the design or actual spec of the unit. There is a tracker software built in so you can actually manage to how much data you’re consuming there so you don’t go over your monthly limits.
Now, the actual tarnish for this particular unit on Vodafone is 25pounds per month and you get one gigabyte per month of data access on that which fairly reasonable since you also get the actual netbook is free, so there’s no cut charge or cost in actually owning the netbook. There is a 24-month contract however the first three months at the moment on a special deal is for free for 30 pounds. So for an extra five pounds a month you triple your daily downloads to three gigabytes against three for the first three months and it’s only 24-month contract and you still get the actual netbook for free as well.
So overall, a brilliant deal and let’s take a look at how fast the actual unit is. Okay, so let’s take a look at actually how quick the 3G data connection is. I’m going to start by connecting to the networks, how much just to get in and connect there and see how long it takes to connect the network, it’s fairly quick. So, it’s about 15 seconds to actually connect there and I should be now ready to use. So, if just try and load up fuel.com and instantly Google appears. So, let’s try a slightly more complex site in Google, let’s try the BBC news. It’s taking a little bit longer there. And now, we have BBC news so it took a little bit longer but as you can see it’s quite a large site, quite graphics, intensive, let's try tech cast network.co.uk, loading, as you can see the image there loaded pretty quickly quite large image.
Let's go to the amount page where you got a few more pictures so again images loading quite quickly, more images. So, we’ve rolled these 3G connections actually pretty quick in my area, but it may vary depending on where you live and the signals you might have, also interference but from where I am standing it’s pretty quick. Let’s try the Discovery Channel. Again, the fairly graphics intensive website takes a little bit longer to load and there you have it, it’s not too bad.
As you can see sort of fairly large website, you’ll load it in a pretty good time, some complex elements in there and obviously the Intel Atom process handling that quite nicely. And one of the things that isn’t able to handle very well is streaming video. So, let’s go to your favorite youtube.com, let's go to videos, let's have a look at launch file, just a quick video clip and you’ll really just loading fairly quickly and there you have it. The video streams and it’s okay you’re up to a certain extent, it kind of skips and jumps every now and again but it is watchable but not very ideal. As you can see there you’ve quite seen the video there that it kind of pauses for a second or two and while it’s playing that’s not because it’s buffering though with the data connection, data connections actually keeping up because of the actual lap of itself while the processing is not keeping up and it’s very unfortunate but there you go.
So, that’s a quick demonstration of the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 running on the Vodafone 3G Network. Overall, a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 Netbook with Vodafone 3G data offers a compelling package for those looking for a mobile broadband solution. The well-built netbook has all of the connectivity options you’ll need and plenty of battery life to give you several hours of wireless productivity.
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