PC World > Product Reviews > Laptops, notebooks and netbooks

Dell Studio One 19

All in one PC

By Scott Bartley / Tuesday, October 27 2009

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It seems you’re just not a PC manufacturer today until you’ve released an all-in-one iMac clone – this month, Dell presents its effort with the rather attractive Studio One 19.

Looking like a widescreen monitor, the Studio One 19 comes ready to go out of the box. It sits atop a small pedestal stand and setup requires nothing more than plugging in the power and making sure you’ve installed the batteries for the mouse and keyboard the right way round. Push the power button (which took me a good 30-40 seconds to locate, by the way) and you’re good to go.

The 18.5-inch display is bright and crisp and is of the extra-wide, movie-friendly 16:9 variety. What’s more, it’s also a touchscreen, which adds an entirely new dimension to the versatility of the thing. It is, if you’re of the masochistic ilk (or happen to lose your mouse), possible to operate the PC using just the touchscreen. However, despite the best efforts of touchscreen developers, using a PC in this manner is still a little on the clunky side. Dell knows this, and has included Touch Zone, a custom-built menu system designed specifically with the touchscreen in mind to provide finger-friendly access to content and applications.

Yes, this is one of those systems that would be right at home on the kitchen bench doubling as a console for all your day-to-day email, Twitter and recipe-toting needs. However, we’ve yet to come across anyone brave enough to install such a precious machine in their kitchen and we reckon the Studio One 19 will more than likely end up on your home office desk. Hiding such a great looking machine away in the spare room is a minor tragedy in itself, but looks aside, Dell has seen fit to equip the Studio One 19 with a range of hardware that ensures this is no show pony – it’s actually useful.

Features and performance
Hardware options start with a pokey little (but very affordable) Intel Celeron 450 CPU and end with the powerful Intel Quad Core Q8200. RAM options are 1GB, 2GB, 3GB or 4GB and hard drives range from 160GB to 750GB. Video is supplied by either an NVidia GeForce 9200 or 9400 – enough to play games, but not the latest greatest variety.

A slot loading DVD burner is hidden away on the side (a Blu-ray option is available) as is an Ethernet port, six USB ports, a 7-in-1 card reader, and headphone and microphone sockets.

Our review unit came with a 2.93GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 4GB of RAM and a GeForce 9200 video card. This powered it to a very respectable WorldBench 6 score of 103, meaning it’s capable of performing just about any task to a high standard that’s asked of it.

Verdict
The Dell is a great-looking and powerful machine. The touchscreen works well; although we found we needed to be quite deliberate with our touch to be sure it registered properly. But since the tech behind the touchscreen is, in fact, developed by Palmerston North-based company Fingertapps, it gets extra points right there. Patriotism aside, while touchscreens are still a novelty for home computing they’re only going to get better and more useful as time goes on. Performing some functions is certainly quicker and easier using the touchscreen, but don’t expect it to be your main form of input. We’re not quite at Minority Report levels of interaction, yet.

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