Dell Inspiron Zino HD Review
Dell Inspiron Zino HD was announced at a preview event on August 2009. It is more like the Studio Hybrid. Zino faced a problem of shipping and the absence of the Blue ray option. However, Dell promises to act on the issue and to solve it in the first week of February. The $468 worth Zino is standard effective home PC. You will need to make upgrades for configurations such as Blue-ray drive, 1080p definition and video streaming.
Inspiron Zino HD has some of the features of the Apple’s Mac Mini. However Zino is user friendly than Mac Mini. Zino comes with a default black color but the top plate can be opted for a change in color for a cost of $15 once you place the order. Inspiron Zino HD is quite larger than Mac Mini and is not appropriate for living room. However if it suits, Zino specifications disappoints and is not up to the mark. As said above video buffering had some problem but the usual way of DVD playback was smooth.
Zino had no problem playing the You tube and the i-store videos however the videos from Hulu content even with its medium quality, Zino struggled to play it. 1080p resolution videos are not supported by Zino. However Dell has promised to come back with it.
High resolution videos can be played with the option of upgrading it to Radeon HD 4330 GPU for a cost of $75. It will well suit your living room. The upgrade should be done once you place the order.
The $468 Zino has the following specifications such as a 1.5 GHz AMD Athlon X2 3250e and a 3GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM. Its default Graphics is 256MB ATI Radeon HD 3200 which can be upgraded as said above. 320GB Hard drives running at 7200 rpm which can be upgraded up to 1TB, Gigabit Ethernet 802.11n and a Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)
The Athlon Processor used is a great advantage for Zino as it makes us feel the cost is worth the performance. With the use of the correct graphic chip, it would best enhance your living room experience.
Tests showed that the Athlon processor X2 3250e stood next to the Intel’s Atom. This is one of the benefits for Zino. The lag in the performance of the Zino shouldn’t surprise you as the Gateway, the Mac Mini and the HP all of them use the full fledged Pentium Processor or the Core 2 Processors. But it is for sure that Zino’s performance will be far more better than the Acer Aspire Revo.
Along with the HDMI output Zino HD also includes two eSATA pots. This enables the option of additional storage devices. As a basic features USB ports comes at the back as a pair and two audio outputs. The desktop can read SD cards and a audio jack. Zino HD can be customized to our requirement and hence Dell gives a vast option of upgrades at the time or ordering. The upgrades include USB TV tuner card, increased RAM, hard drive as mentioned above.
Dell Zino’s power performance stand to our expectations. The amazing power efficiencies from Apple products made it sweep the market. However among Windows PCs Zino is up to the expectation. The warranty period is for a year on parts and labor. Various resources and tool available on the web site.
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Just bought a red topped Zino with Blue Ray and connected it to my Ambilight Philips TV through HDMI – absolutely brilliant! We have never seen our (stellar) TV perform so good yet and the idea of have a relatively noiseless PC, rather good looking – and including new Win 7 software combines very nicely. We did get the X2 processor and the 512Mbyte Graphics card – would get that for any PC these days. You do have to set it up though – set audio to HDMI output (instead of to speaker output) and get rid of MS Messenger.