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As a piece of audio video equipment, the Dell Inspiron One 2320 will sit in the corner like a well-behaved child. There's no audible fan noise while it's idling. With gaming this does ramp up, but then so does your speaker noise. Noise is handled well by the JBL speakers, with no distortion or even an amount of bass.
For surround sound, an SPDIF output is provided. The display is bright, defines colour well and we love the 1920 x 1080p resolution. Horizontal viewing angles are good, vertical not so much, with light bleed along the bottom of the display, but this isn't going to detract from normal viewing.
The touch-enabled panel only provides two-point capabilities, which is enough for pinch-to-zoom and rotate, but it's a bare minimum. As a touch panel it works extremely well, and almost identically to the MSI Wind Top AE2210. It actually picks up finger placement just before it touches the screen.
We doubt we're ever going to be happy with any hard controls - there are volume and brightness controls down the left-hand side and power on the right. These are out of sight, and while responsive enough, are a little painful to use. A Media Center remote is supplied, so that in many ways does compensate for this.
The Core i5-equipped Dell Inspiron One 2320 we had to test put in its usual strong processing performance. It ranked 4.1 in CineBench 11 for general multi-core performance, while for encoding it ran through x264 HD v4 at 114.12fps Pass 1 and 22.34fps Pass 2.
For many people these types of results are almost irrelevant, since even the lesser Pentium model would be fast enough for any standard task.
Where this model picks up the game is with the Nvidia GT 525M graphics, scoring P922 in 3DMark11 and 7589 in 3DMark06.
This shows it's capable of running modern games at 720p resolutions with medium quality settings, and older games at 1080p resolutions.
We're disappointed with the supplied peripherals - they're like something that fell out of a Christmas cracker. The one saving grace is that they are at least wireless. Neither have any redeeming features other than the fact that they're black and they work.
On a more positive note, the supplied software is good. There's a nicely designed scrolling touch-enabled launcher with access to a suite of touch-enabled media tools, games and resources. Personally we'd be happy with Media Center, but the more the merrier.
