Dell Studio One 19 review

Improved touchscreen support will be a key feature of Windows 7, but it's hard to say whether this will kick-start a big uptake of such displays.

Despite the touchscreen's uncertain future, Dell has joined other big PC manufacturers, such as Asus and HP, in releasing an all-in-one touchscreen PC.

The Studio One 19's touchscreen display measures 18.5in and has a relatively modest 1,366x768 resolution. It supports multi-touch gestures; for example, you can cycle through your applications by simply dragging two fingers across the desktop. The screen doesn't use the usual touch-sensitive technology; instead, there's an array of IR sensors around the edges that detect the location of your fingers. This works OK, but it isn't as precise as the capacitative or resistive screens used on smartphones and tablet PCs. Once we'd cleaned our mucky fingerprints off the screen, image quality was quite impressive. Whites are clear and bright, and colours are vibrant.

Dell has done its best to make Vista as touchscreen-friendly as possible, with the large desktop icons and a fat taskbar making it easier to prod your way through basic tasks. A small range of touch-friendly applications are also installed. These can be launched from the Dell Touch Zone, but this takes up around a third of your desktop. The photo browser lets you position and scale photos onscreen, and is more fun than the usual slideshow sessions. There's also a great drawing package for kids, and some fun touchscreen games.

For more traditional use, there's a stylish wireless keyboard and mouse. The receiver for these is built into the main unit, so there's no messy dongle to contend with. Also built in is 802.11b/g wireless, but there's no Draft-N support. There are a total of six USB ports for adding peripherals, along with a memory card reader.

Build quality is generally good, particularly the sturdy stand. Our one gripe is that the display looks a little small compared to the PC as a whole. The bezel is made out of plastic, rather than glass. It looks OK, but scratched easily, which for a hands-on PC is problematic. The outer section is covered in stretched fabric, which could get grubby. This hides the 4W stereo speakers, which lack bass and volume. A stereo minijack output is provided, but adding speakers somewhat defeats the point of buying an all-in-one PC.

The Studio One 19 has a speedy 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 processor and 3GB of RAM. This makes it faster than most similarly priced laptops, but a traditional desktop PC with similar specifications costs just £500. The Nvidia GeForce 9400M chipset isn't quick enough to handle modern 3D games, but you can play HD video without problems. However, you'll need to buy the £969 top-end model to get a built-in Blu-ray drive. A slot-loading DVD writer is fitted, along with a 500GB hard disk.

With the jury still out on touchscreens, we can only judge the Studio One 19 on its merits today. With decent performance and a big hard disk, it's certainly better value than the Atom-based touchscreen PCs we saw last month (Labs, Shopper 259), though that's not saying much. If you have young kids or want a living-room PC for simple tasks such as media playback and web browsing, the touchscreen is a good extra feature. If you're taken by the design but don't want the touchscreen, then a similarly specified model with a standard display is available for £699.

Author: Seth Barton