Dell Hybrid

Posted on July 29, 2008

Dell announced today their new Hybrid, a mini-pc designed to help the company accomplish their green agenda which calls for a 25% reduction in power output of their equipment by 2010.

It’s a cutesy computer, made mini by the marriage of laptop components with a small, stylish case that is meant to sit still and coupling with it standard input devices like keyboard and mouse and using standard lcd monitors, up to 24″ in their current offering.

They have resorted to using slot-load DVD drives to reduce space and also allow ease of placement for the PC. It can be horizontal or vertical. I’ve been a fan of slot drives since owning one, a Pioneer I think, several years ago. They never made a significant dent in the market as most manufacturers stayed with the drawer design. With designs like this they are poised for a big comeback.

This PC has quite good specs and starting at $499, isn’t too hard on the pocketbook either. Like Dell has been doing with the Inspiron notebook the last year or so, the Hybrid has all kinds of colored sleeves available to dress things up.

If you’re willing to pay for the upgrades, this little box can really talk big. Core Duo up to 2.6Ghz, 4GB of RAM, 320GB HD, Blu-Ray.

This may finally be starting to show the way we’re heading with resizing PCs. Once solid-state devices reach the capacity levels of desktop PCs, another very large reduction in case size will be in order. We’re already down to a large novel size with this effort, about 8″x8″x3″. Move to SSD storage and work on the motherboard a little and we could be looking at 6″x5″ or so. That’s nearly pocket size.