News

posted on 29 July 2008 09:07

Dell is launching a Studio Hybrid home server PC featuring intersting and colourful designs along with Blu-ray support.

The company's US website will return a surface-level search result on 'Studio Hybrid' but clicking through gets you nowhere - yet. (In the UK go here.)

What we can know is that this is a very green, embedded PC server for the home. Photographs have been released and show a richly coloured box with curved ends. You might mistake it at first glance for a large external hard drive as it is up to 80 percent smaller than a tower PC.

The product draws less than 65 watts compared to a tower-format PC's 300 or so watts. It has HDMI video support for playing stored material on a digital high-definition TV screen It can include a TV tuner and a flash card reader supporting eight formats. This is a system that can be used as a home theatre PC.

The Studio Hybrid's case sleeve can have a bamboo-like finish if desired and can be changed if you wish.

A possible spec for $499 is for a dual-core, 1.734GHz Pentium CP, 2GB RAM, a 160GB hard drive and Windows Vista. It might scale up to a 2.6GHz Core Duo processor, 4GB RAM and a 320GB drive.

Other options could include WiFi connectivity and Bluetooth with a wireless keyboard option for interacting with it across the room: you on the sofa and the system's screen display on the TV.

More here.

^{[Martin Edwards, news reader.]}