Meivo LCD TV/PC hybrid rocks our world

By Rory Reid on 13 April 2007, 11:40am

All our PC-in-a-TV dreams were answered this morning, when we received our very own rock Meivo -- an LCD telly with a computer crammed inside it.

We blogged about this back in March, where we fawned unashamedly over its four TV tuners (four!), twin hard drives and Wi-Fi capability, but today was the first time we actually played with one in the flesh.

It looks as if rock has backtracked on its promise of four tuners -- you only get two, in the form of a dual hybrid analogue/digital tuner (so there's sort of four, but not really, as you can only record two things at once), and just the one 250GB hard drive. This is fairly average by Media Center PC standards, but it's possible to add an extra tuner and hard drive if you're that way inclined.

The Meivo's 22-inch screen runs at a native resolution of 1,680x1,050 pixels, so it'll churn out 720p movies no sweat. There's a set of integrated speakers and runs on Vista, plus the 1.8GHz CPU and 2GB of RAM give it enough power to satisfy your telly-watching, Web-surfing requirements without a struggle.

The Meivo is also fantastic-looking: the screen is surrounded by a clear Perspex bezel to give it a modern, contemporary feel. There are LED lights built directly into the Perspex, and you can even wall-mount the thing -- not bad for a £999 machine.

We're still not convinced by rock's marketing of the PC as a 'video on demand' sytem (all Media Center PCs can stream Web-based content) but we'll reserve judgement until we write a full review. Watch this space. -Rory Reid