Dell, The Mini 9 and Vodafone

We’ve posted about the possibility of Dell’s new Inspiron Mini 9 Netbook being subsidized by Telcos in the future. It looks like if you live in Europe, you might be first on the list to see for yourself. That won’t be until later in September, but according to this article from Crave, Vodafone will partnering with Dell. My hunch is the deal is going to be a bit more complicated here in the US for a variety of reasons, but we’ll have to see how this plays out.

What’s also interesting about the Crave article is that Dell’s John Thode says this:

We didn’t build a small PC, we built an ultramobile device.” “It does a lot of PC functions, but its intent was not to emulate a PC in every aspect.”

I can buy that approach to these machines as a companion device. I’m just wondering if consumers see the difference as the entire Netbook wave moves forward in a market that is filled with both excitement and uncertainity. Managing expectations is a tough thing to do, and in my opinion is going to be even tougher with Netbooks. What are you going to call them, Not-a-Netbook?