Dell Studio One 19 (the iMac clone)
Now that I’m blogging again, I need stuff to blog about. (Since I’ve decided to keep work and blog seperate, it’ll have to be something else. So, here we go. The Dell Studio One 19 came to my attention today, so I had a bit of a look at it, and figured I’d post something for nobody in particular to have a read…
At first, it looks like Dell has taken the proven (to some) concept of an all-in-one PC and made a few stylistic changes to make it their own. The Studio One 19 looks nice. It’s less boxy than any iMac today and it comes in a range of colours. While this isn’t a huge deciding factor for most people, I think people must be making their family PC a centre piece of a room – like the TV is for more than most – and as a result, they want it to look good.
Now for the really cool bit… it has a touch screen! This is brilliant. Of course, I’m not entirely sure what most people might want a touch screen for – particularly if you had kids (or big kids for that matter) with grubby fingers. It’s a nice touch, and I guess if you combined it with an application like CoolIris, it would make for a very nice “3D” browsing experience for the supported websites – google image search, youtube, flickr, facebook, just to name a few.
The choice of a 16:9 ratio makes me think that Dell are also aiming this at a small-scale movie market. Most wide screen computer monitors are 16:10 – for example, my 19″ wide LCD monitor has black bars when watching a DVD or playing on the xbox 360, but it also has a native resolution of 1440×900. I would think though, that the 18.5″ display may cause some people problems – especially gamers – because of the non-standard resolution (1366×768). The ratio change may also cause some stretching if your standard wide-screen game images as well, but that probably isn’t going to be a big problem for many people – we’re past games that use geometrically correct shapes for everything.
Speaking of gamers, the one thing that does let this machine down, is the choice (or lack of) video cards. It comes with an nVidia 9200 or 9400 video adapter as standard, without any real options to upgrade. What this means, is that if you want to play anything substantial (flash games don’t count), you’re pretty much going to be out of luck.
The 4GB of RAM is ok, and I guess the part of me that wants more, isn’t going to be happy with a system like this that I can’t pull apart and tweak anyway. I know that Windows 7 is supposed to be less resource hungry than Vista, but I certainly wouldn’t be locking myself in to *only* 4 gig with a new operating system due out before the end-of-life on a brand-spanking-new PC. I always believe in giving myself some room to grow – whether it’s a computer, a house, or a belt, the same theory applies.
All in all, it has a lot of things to make people say “Oooh” and “Aaah”, but I’m not sure that’s enough for AU$2500 worth of computer system. I can build a faster, stronger, albeit more chunky, machine in an afternoon for the same kind of money.