Dell Inspiron One 19 Desktop Touch review

Thanks to Windows 7, a new all-in-one PC without a touch interface is a rare thing these days, and all the big guns are diving in. Dell is the latest to give its range a much-needed touch upgrade, but the Inspiron One 19 Desktop Touch is no expensive Flash Harry – it’s one of the cheapest multitouch PCs we’ve yet seen.

Despite the £467 exc VAT price, this touchscreen PC doesn’t skimp on quality. True, a 19in, 1,366 x 768 panel is no longer the draw it once was, but it’s pleasant to use. Aside from the tiny lag common to most touchscreen displays, the Inspiron proved responsive, and accurate enough for navigating Windows 7 Home Premium.

It’s a cut above its competition, too. The Dell’s capacitive interface is far more tactile than the resistive screen of our previous budget favourite, the MSI Wind Top AE2020. The screen shows no sign of backlight bleed and the panel is evenly lit. The surface has a slightly mottled effect, a necessary side-effect of capacitive touchscreen layer, but it’s no worse than on rival machines.

Dell’s pre-installed software is good, too. The many apps are accessed through the Dell Touch Zone Lobby, which collects icons into a radial menu that stretches across the bottom of the screen. Unlike the front-end software suites included with other touchscreen all-in-ones we’ve seen, Dell’s dock doesn’t occupy the entire screen and still allows access to the wider OS.

The dock is populated with a range of proprietary apps, although there’s little we haven’t seen before. There’s the usual note-taking app – this time with added sound effects – and a range of tools for handling photos, movies and music, all of which borrow the radial menu system of the dock. There aren’t any games beyond those that come with the Touch Pack for Windows 7.

The chassis isn’t flashy, but the glossy black plastic looks neat, feels reasonably solid, and belies the Inspiron’s low price. The port selection is also good: three USB sockets, audio jacks and a card reader on the right-hand side, with more USB sockets alongside PS/2 and, strangely, parallel and D-SUB inputs on the rear.

Where Dell appears to have scrimped is on the components. The 18-month-old Intel Pentium Dual Core E5300 is fast enough to deliver a benchmark of 1.19 which, although creaking in today’s Core i3 world, is enough to handle the majority of everyday tasks demanded of a home all-in-one. The 4GB of RAM is plenty, although it’s older DDR2 memory, and there’s a 500GB hard disk, a DVD writer and a 802.11g wireless adapter.

Unsurprisingly, the price doesn’t include discrete graphics either. Instead, Intel’s integrated GMA X4500 chip managed just 8fps in our lowest Crysis benchmark, suggesting only the most basic of 3D gaming will be a possibility. It’s capable of handling HD video playback, though, churning through our 720p tests clips without a stutter.

The speakers aren’t up to much, though. Packing 2W each, this set isn’t just quiet, there’s an almost total absence of bass and the rest of the range is tinny and indistinct. To be fair, they’re no worse than those on the MSI, but they make it difficult to listen to music or watch movies with any sort of pleasure.

The included keyboard and mouse are fairly average. As well as taking up two USB ports with their wired connections, they lack the kind of media controls we’d surely hope for on a PC that could easily be set up as an entertainment hub.

There are faults, then, but the Dell Inspiron One 19 Desktop Touch proves its worth in other areas. It has an excellent screen and a keen sense of style, performance is good enough for the tasks at hand, and the price is low enough to make it a viable purchase for a study, rather than as a main PC. All things considered, it’s a better all-round choice than the budget MSI, and takes away a well deserved award.

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