Why You Can Trust CNET Shuttle X Vision X50 review: Shuttle X Vision X50
Sporting a touchscreen, dual-core Intel Atom 330 CPU, attractive design and good connectivity, the 15.6-inch X Vision X50 all-in-one desktop PC looks, on paper, to have plenty going for it. But is it enough to knock the market-leading Asus Eee Top off its perch?
Shuttle is best known for its small-form-factor PCs and bare-bones systems, so it was something of a surprise when the company branched out into the low-cost all-in-one market. With the X Vision X50, the company is aiming to dethrone the Asus Eee Top as the all-in-one nettop of choice.
Shuttle X Vision X50
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
The X50 is available to buy now from Ambros for £535.
Design
The X50 is far smaller than one might first expect. Its screen is a mere 15.6 inches and, even with its relatively fat bezel, it only measures 391 by 327 by 36mm, which makes it approximately the same size as a flat-panel 15-inch monitor. As a result, the X50 isn't the sort of machine you'd necessarily want to sit in front of for extended periods, although it's fine for short to medium-length bursts of usage.
The X50 can be easily moved from room to room. The adjustable kickstand at the rear folds 180° and doubles as a carry handle, although it's just as easy to carry the 3.6kg chassis under your arm. The X50 has a rather low centre of gravity and can stay upright on its stand on surfaces as narrow as 4 inches, so you have plenty of freedom as to where you position it.
The X50's styling isn't particularly inspired, but neither is it offensive. Its glossy white plastic and sharp edges give it an austere, no-nonsense look. We're not massively keen on the thin blue strip of LED lighting the machine casts onto whatever surface it inhabits. It looks cool, but the feature is unashamedly 'inspired' by the blue light strip on the Eee Top. Worse still, the light can't be switched off completely. It can only be dimmed, and that could be annoying at night.
Connectivity on the X50 is pretty good, considering its size. It packs two USB ports on the left side and a further three on the right, plus a four-in-one memory card reader, Ethernet and three discrete audio jacks (line-in, headphones and mic). The left side of the machine is also home to an odd adjuster mechanism that lets you change screen brightness, the volume of the integrated speakers, and the brightness level of the LED light.
This is more complicated than it needs to be. Users are required to press the 'mode' switch to cycle between the aforementioned adjustments, which causes a corresponding blue LED on the lower front bezel to cycle between different settings. Once the LED is positioned beneath the icon of your choice, you hit plus or minus on the rocker switch to make changes. This system is easy to use once you get to grips with it, but it's not particularly intuitive on first use.
Features
The X50 has a pretty decent specification for such a small, unassuming PC. At its heart lies an Intel Atom 330 dual-core CPU running at a frequency of 1.6GHz, and 1GB of RAM. The X50 won't win any speed records, but these components are more than sufficient given that the X50 is unlikely to be used for much multitasking. Some would even argue that the dual-core 330 is overkill, since the single-core Atom N270 is perfectly serviceable for the types of things you'll be probably be using the X50 for.
Storage is pretty average for this type of PC. The X50 ships with a 160GB hard drive, which will give you sufficient room to store an almost endless supply of recipes. It also affords you space to stash a couple of hundred movie files, should you wish to use the X50 as a bedside video-playback device -- not that it's particularly well-suited to that purpose.
The X50's display is disappointing in more ways than one. Firstly, its image quality is pretty atrocious. The level of dithering is akin to the dotty effect you find on printouts from a cheap inkjet printer, and we found it irritating to look at for long periods. The fact that the display has a 16:9 aspect ratio from its 1,366x768-pixel resolution doesn't save it, either, and neither does the fact that it's touch-sensitive.
The touchscreen is supposed to be the X50's most spectacular feature, but ends up being a spectacular failure for several reasons. Firstly, Windows XP is rubbish as a touch interface -- it simply wasn't built for that purpose. Using the stylus makes things slightly easier, but we soon stopped using that. The stylus compartment is so closely located to the power button that reaching for it often causes you to accidentally hit the power button, switching the X50 off in the process.
It gets worse, too. Double clicking icons is nigh on impossible with the X50. We're not sure why, but launching an application via double tapping can take anywhere between three and thirteen attempts -- even when we adjusted the double-clicking speed. As a result, the X50 is unusable without a mouse and keyboard -- neither of which is supplied.
We can't fault the X50's networking capabilities. It's equipped with 1,000Mbps Gigabit Ethernet, plus a high-speed 802.11n wireless LAN adaptor. You also get other little luxuries, such as a 1.3-megapixel webcam, a built-in microphone and a copy of Norton Internet Security 2009. The X50 is also available without an operating system for about £65 less.
Performance
The X50 scored a relatively impressive 2,010 in the PCMark05 benchmark test. That's around 25 per cent more than the Eee Top achieved with its N270 CPU. But you're unlikely to feel the benefit, since the X50 isn't the sort of machine you're going to be running demanding apps on. Not that you'd be able to launch those apps without a mouse anyway.
3D performance is poor, as expected. The X50 clocked up a meagre 180 points in 3DMark06. That means high-definition playback is out of the question, although you'll still be able to watch standard-definition content.
Conclusion
You'd be something of a fool to buy the Shuttle X Vision X50, because it's a touchscreen PC whose touchscreen doesn't work very well. It's also significantly more expensive than the market-leading Eee Top. We'd only buy it if we had money to burn, or if we'd bumped our heads on something really hard.
Edited by Charles Kloet