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HP’s latest all-in-one PC costs £500, which is pretty impressive for a PC with a 20in display, 4GB RAM and a large hard disk. Unlike many manufacturers, HP doesn’t insist on using touchscreens across its entire all-in-one range, which saves money that can be spent on these other features.
The Omni 100 has an energy-efficient dual-core AMD Athlon II X2 260u processor. It’s not massively powerful by any means, but provides acceptable performance for most desktop tasks; and without getting warm enough to require noisy cooling fans. The processor is paired with an AMD 880G motherboard chipset, with an integrated ATI Radeon HD 4270 graphics processor. The rest of the specification includes 4GB of DDR3 RAM, a spacious 1TB hard disk and a DVD writer.
The graphics chipset isn’t up to anything but the most undemanding casual games – it managed just 4.2fps in our CoD4 test – but it can handle any kind of video you throw at it. Don’t expect to watch in Full HD, though; the built-in 20in widescreen LCD display has a maximum resolution of 1,600×900. However, this is high enough to ensure excellent detail and graphical quality on a screen of this size. Like most all-in-one PCs, there are no ports to output video to a TV or projector.
The Omni 100 has six USB ports, one of which will be taken up by the adaptor for its wireless keyboard and mouse. There’s not much else on the back: just a Gigabit Ethernet port and a 3.5mm stereo line output. There’s another 3.5mm headphone output on the side, along with a microphone input. Sadly, the three 3.5mm ports can’t be reconfigured for 5.1 surround sound.
Thankfully, the built-in speakers are surprisingly good, with a solid, bassy sound and plenty of volume. They’re good enough for iPlayer or the radio, but for more serious listening they do tend towards a slightly muddy mid-range. The display is also a cut above most, we were impressed by its matt, rather than glossy, finish. Colours are warm, with a very faintly yellow cast which produced slightly muted but pleasingly natural tones.
The supplied wireless mouse and keyboard are much as we’ve come to expect from HP. The low-profile keyboard provides a comfortable typing position, but its flat, laptop-style keys are don’t travel enough to feel really responsive. The ambidextrous mouse is compact and comfortable to use.
No one buys an all-in-one PC for performance, but the Omni 100 isn’t very powerful even compared to other all-in-one PCs, achieving an overall score in our tests of just 51. That’s fine for web browsing, office tasks and media playback – the things you might want a PC like this for – but poor by any other standard of comparison.
£500 is a low price and we appreciated the generous hard disk and memory specification, plus the decent screen and speakers. It’s far from being the most powerful PC, but it’s more than capable of day-to-day tasks and is a generally a pleasure to use.
