Dell Inspiron Mini 9 gutted

So this netbook is all of the rage these days with everyone falling over themselves to do a review and to talk about the upcoming 3G model and so on and so forth. I’ve been pretty forward about my overwhelming ambivalence where this is concerned, but I have to give Dell a little credit when it comes to the insides of the machine. Even though the rest of the design is somewhat underwhelming (though I still like how they’ve handled the bezel), it seems that they’ve included all sorts of opportunities for hacking their machine into something infinitely more cool.

So aside from the obvious RAM upgrade, it’d appear that the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 has a few extra spots available to cram things into. The big deal here is that a large portion of the internals are all just mini PCI-E cards, and presuming one can find some sort of module in that size, all sorts of hacking and additions can be made, aside from just cramming stuff into empty spaces.

The WiFi card is just a mini PCI-E card, and assuming one could find a faster card (an N card, for instance), it may just be a simple matter of popping the old one out and putting a new one in. I’m not sure that’s necessary, but someone is going to do it.

However, the really interesting part in the netbook is the empty slot that’s also conveniently labeled “WWAN”. Speculation is that this is where the 3G card will go (and it certainly seems likely), but it could also, theoretically, be used for additional storage, assuming one could again find the appropriate card to fit into that slot.

While I find myself mostly agreeing with the reviews that have placed it in the “3 out of 5″ category, I am interested to see what sort of crazy hackery people will come up with. That stuff, at least, will be infinitely more interesting than the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 is out of the box.

Laptopmag has lots more including some great pictures of the netbook dissection.