Dell Studio Hybrid takes on Asus Eee Box

We love to see a good old fashioned scrap, and Dell’s just squared up to Asus with its own Eee Box challenger: the Studio Hybrid.

It’s a dinky desktop PC, and although it’s more expensive than Asus’ offering at £400, it packs in extras not found in the Eee’s bargain box.

A wireless keyboard and mouse are standard, for instance. And that colourful shell is swappable to make it suit your workspace.

So why is it called the Hybrid? Dell reckons its as much a media centre as a PC, with a HDMI socket for easy connection to a telly. Of course, you’ll need to yank it from a monitor and cart it into the living room first. And Dell don’t include a remote control.

We’re not completely convinced about its media centre ambitions, but its specs are certainly impressive. Inside there’s a roomy 320GB hard drive, 4GB of memory and an Intel Core 2 Duo processor.

Around the back there’re network sockets, optical audio outputs, firewire and USB connections, as well as network, monitor and HDMI sockets.

Out now | From £400 | Dell

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