Samsung U250 All-in-One PC : Not the Most Powerful but the Gorgeous Design
Monday, July 19 2010
Not the most powerful all-in-one, but gorgeous design is well worth paying a bit extra for…
Samsung has long produced beautiful monitors, and from the front the U250 looks to be another gorgeous example. With its gloss-black finish, clear edging and thin glass neck, It’s as stylish as any SyncMaster TFT we’ve seen, and only hint that something is amiss is the slight increase in thickness – at 43mm, there’s room to hide a full PC on the back.
It’s an impressive feat, and the U250 is the first all-in-one PC we’ve seen that you could genuinely mistake as a monitor. It helps that Samsung has stuck closely to its TFT template, tweaking it into pull off the screen and PC combo without it impending on desirability.
The all black design is broken up by a single blue power light beneath the Samsung logo, a 1.3 megapixel Webcam at the top and a discreet row of touch controls in the bottom-right corner. Everything else you might need its at the near or on the sides, neatly hidden away by the slightly protruding clear bezels.
It comes with two USB ports on the side- one of which handles eSATA- and four on the rear, as well as a DVD writer and an SD/MMC card reader. The rear panel has a DVI output for use in a dual monitor setup, and there’s a GigaBit Ethernet port to go with the 802.11n Wi-Fi.
The 23in screen didn’t let us down. With a 1,920×1,080 resolution and a 5ms response time, it’s at home with work or media, and although Samsung lists the brightness at just 250cd/m2, it appeared vibrant and even in our test. The 3W speakers were loud enough to handle most audio, and they made a decent first of giving movies the atmosphere they require.
But the quality isn’t all the Samsung has to offer: the screen support multi-touch, and Samsung includes its own play Touch suite. It consist of little more than a multi-desktop space to ping your files around, and a slightly less cluttered touch skin for internet explorer. Neither held our interest fore more than a view minutes, so you’ll want to download the Microsoft Touch pack to sustain the multi-touch novelty.
Either way, we remain skeptical over the long-term appeal of touch in desktop PCs. regardless of the technology used, the position of the screen means you’ll soon have aching arms-touch is the best seen as an occasionally useful partner to the normal keyboard and mouse.
Another letdown is Samsung’s choice of processor. where every other new PC and laptop is coming with the latest core i3 and i5 chip, the U250 has stuck with a 2.2GHz core 2 Duo T6600. It isn’t a slow CPU – 1.11 in our benchmarks is fine, and it must be pointed our that no other all-in-one has yet moved to core i3 either- but with scores now routinely doubling that of the Samsung, we’d have preferred a bolder move.
You do get 4GB of DDR3, however, and there’s a removable cover on the rear should you want to upgrade. you’ll need to replace, rather than add to, the two 2GB sticks present since there are no free slots. there’s a 500GB hard disk, Samsung’s recovery manager kicks in on first boot so you can burn all the required discs and create partition.
The Samsung U250 hides its PC components more successfully than any all-in-one we’ve seen yet, and its style is only matched by far dearer Sony and HP alternatives. But the Acer Aspire Z5610, offer the same multi-touch screen but with quad-core power and a 1 TB hard disk for a similar £740 exc VAT. If that power is important the Acer is a slightly better deal, but it’s hard not to fall for Samsung’s delightful design. For many, that will be worth paying a little more.
