£299 Dell Inspiron Mini 9 To Rival XPS and Vostro 1310 siblings

So here's Dell's new Netbook contender, the Inspiron Mini 9 laptop which unsurprisingly, is being sold at £299 including VAT and delivery.

The Mini has yet to be put forward on Dell's US website (at the time of writing), but its price is nearer to £250, further reinforcing the idea of Rip-off Britain, although the US version has a 8GB SSD.

The mini laptop will also be available only in black and will come with a bundled Box.net basic plan which allows you to have an online 2GB storage. Of course you can use Gdrive and access Gmail's 7GB online storage as well but that's not supported for now.

A cheaper version of the laptop is expected to appear at a later stage without Windows XP home but with Ubuntu, a Dell custom interface and a smaller hard disk drive. The price is said to hover around £269 including VAT and delivery.

While the laptop is positively smaller and less powerful compared to the other ultra portables from Dell (like the Vostro 1310 and the XPS series), the fact that it comes with Windows XP and packs a few good features (like a Solid State Disk) means that the Mini 9 could end up cannibalizing the sales of its bigger brothers.

That's something that Dell seems to be fully aware of as it is next to impossible to find that laptop within a couple of clicks at least on the US version (at the time of writing). Furthermore, Dell has also launched a new range of small laptops, the Inspiron 13 which comes with a 13-inch screen.