Vodafone offers the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 with its mobile broadband

Recent news announced that Dell’s new UK mobile broadband partner is to be Vodafone and from the middle of October Vodafone will be offer a ‘free’ Inspiron Mini 9 on two of its 24 month contracts.

The first of these packages will offer users a 1GB download limit for £25 per month and the other offers 3GB worth of downloads for £30 per month. The additional usage charges on both of these contracts will cost a huge £15 per GB.

The speeds for downloading with Vodafone’s new packages are the same as its mobile broadband dongles offering up to 7.2Mbps although access at the fastest speed will be restricted by very limited coverage. Recent speed tests found that in areas in and around south London and on London’s south bank 3G speeds of 384Kbps could be achieved but in most cases only GRPS speeds could be managed of under 56Kbps.

The laptop offered by Vodafone is the same as the standard Dell Inspiron mini 9 but only offers 8GB of solid state storage instead of the usual 16GB and this limited storage size may limit the functionality of the laptop for all but the most basic uses.

Users will, however, be able to increase to storage capacity of Vodafone’s mini 9 with the use of either USB memory sticks or flash memory cards. The notebook supports both the memory stick and SD formats through is flash memory slots and also has three USB slots which will allow a few applications to run from USB memory sticks.

Another feature of the free laptop is the 8.9 inch screen with a resolution of 1024 by 600 pixels, which should allow it to be used for both document editing and web browsing although anything more serious will be severely limited by the screens small size.

From a performance perspective the laptop runs well but can be a little slower when initially opening the applications and accessing the internet via the mobile broadband connection can be a little slower than with a normal USB dongle.