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All-in-one PCs are iffy for me. I dig the compact nature of them and how there’s so much less to mess with, but you usually sacrifice things in the way of ports and, of course, upgradability. I’ve got an iMac, which is fine, but I’m not really a Mac guy so I don’t use it much, other than for testing & troubleshooting stuff for clients. I had an HP TouchSmart for a couple of weeks, but although it looked nice, it wasn’t super-great for gaming and I wasn’t thrilled with HP’s implementation of the touch functionality.

With Windows 7 on the horizon, and the fact that touchy stuff will be baked in, we should start seeing more and more touch-aware computing devices available for the PC landscape (and I fully intend to give the HPs another shot once Win 7 is out), so it’s no surprise to see Dell releasing a series of all-in-one PCs, some of which feature multi-touch-capable touch screens.

The Studio One 19 comes in all white, or a choice of four fabric (!) trim colors (blue, charcoal, pink and red), which is interesting. Less interesting, however, are the tech specs: Although it can be configured with a quad-core CPU (Intel’s 2.33 GHz Q8200), memory options are limited to 800 MHz and video hardware is, in the more expensively-equipped versions, NVIDIA’s GeForce 9400 GPU (with the even less-potent GeForce 9200 on lower-priced versions). Finally, the 18.5″ display only runs at 1366 x 768, which is lower-res than most laptops these days, even ones with screens more than 2″ smaller. This also begs the question of why the Studio One 19 is offered with Blu-ray, since you’d only be able to watch it at 720p anyway (there’s no HDMI-out).

So the Studio One 19 is probably not the best choice for a serious gaming machine or even a home theater PC, but if you don’t need a touchscreen and just want a swanky-looking, all-in-one PC for general use in your home, the base model, at $699, is actually not a bad deal for a nice-looking all-in-one system. It won’t be fast, but it’ll probably let you do most daily tasks pretty well. It’s strange, too, because the “loaded” touchscreen model at $1,300 doesn’t seem like a wonderful deal. Sure, at that price, it’s nice to have Blu-ray, but not on a 1366 x 768 display.

Check it out for yourself, though…maybe you can find a good price / features balance for your needs…it’s definitely nice looking, and again, I think the low-end units aren’t a bad deal considering the convenience of the all-in-one form factor.