Digital Home Thoughts: Meet the Dell Inspiron Zino HD

Zune HD? No, the Zino HD! What a curious little machine. It looks like a Mac Mini to some degree, but in my opinion lacks the style of the Studio Hybrid, another machine in Dell's line-up that competes in the small-desktop category. What it lacks in style, however, it makes up for in hardware horsepower: it can be configured with a 1 TB 7200 RPM hard drive, 6 GB of RAM, an ATI Radeon HD 4330 512MB GPU, and a Blu-ray drive. The somewhat downer? For a CPU the best you can get is a 1.8 Ghz AMD X2 6850E. That's the Neo CPU that's in the HP dv2 and other thin-and-light laptops. It's not a bad CPU - it's far more powerful than an Atom processor - but any Core 2 Duo CPU would kick the silicon out of it. And you can get the much more powerful CPU in the Studio Hybrid.

So what you have here is a machine that would do well as an HTPC, or an office workstation-type machine. No known pricing yet in USD - the Dell Ireland pricing makes the maxed out version of this machine in at around the $1300 USD mark...which is a bit pricey. We'll see what tomorrow holds for Dell.com and Dell.ca.