Dell’s Inspiron Zino HD on sale now in America: starts at $229, doubles as an HTPC

November 12th, 2009 | Category: Gadget Corner

Dell has taken its sweet moment in bringing the 7.75- x 7.75- x 3.5-inch Inspiron Zino HD to market, but just 24 hours after it made its market debut across the pond, that little zinger is finally available to the Yanks in attendance. Starting at just $229, the mini PC is far more exhilarating than most ho hum nettops. Oh certain, the base configuration is fairly unexciting, but thankfully Dell enables you to add up to 8GB of memory, a 1.8GHz dual-core AMD Athlon Neo X2 6850e CPU, up to 1TB of HDD space, an optional Blu-ray drive, a 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4330 discrete GPU and WiFi to the mix. ‘Course, speccing it out will obviously raise the price substantially, but it’s always nice to see more potential than anticipated within such a minuscule box. Of note, Dell additionally mentions that an optional TV tuner, wireless keyboard and mouse are available, but at least for now, the TV tuner is nowhere to be found in the configuration pages. Other inclusions

are a 4-in-1 card reader, four USB 2.0 sockets and a pair of eSATA ports. Who says HTPCs have to breathe fire?

Update: We’ve just heard that the TV tuner won’t be available at launch (sounds a lot like what happened with the Mini 10), so there goes those dreams of immediately gratifying your urge for a new HTPC of the smallest scale.

Gallery: Dell’s Inspiron Zino HD on sale now in America: starts at $229, doubles as an HTPC