Product Reviews

The secret of the AJP's cracking looks is its screen. The truly modern computer screen is no longer big, bulky and powered by an electron gun, firing particles at phosphor-coated screen in a heavy-duty glass vacuum tube. Now svelte, TFT flat-panel screens are the order of the day.

But aren't they rather expensive? Well, until recently they certainly were. But now the complicated manufacturing processes that kept the prices high have been mastered by those wily Koreans, savvy Taiwanese and clued-up Japanese.

Between them, those three nations have produced around 35 million flat panels this year. And they're not stopping there, with the Taiwanese expected to double flat-panel production this year, overtaking South Korea as the leading producer. Hopefully, a veritable deluge of budget TFT screens will soon be landing on desktops around the world. Indeed, this year production of flat-panel screens is expected to surpass that of CRT monitors for the first time.

The screen isn't the only way the AJP differs from your standard desktop - in fact, the whole design has more in common with a notebook, except that it's built to sit on a desk. The screen incorporates a range of notebook-style components and sits on a sturdy foot that houses yet more electronics. The floppy and DVD drives are built into one side of the screen, with a PC card socket and a pair of USB sockets on the other. Round the back of the screen are the usual selection of ports, including FireWire, network, sound, communications,

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and a parallel printer port. A pair of speakers is built into the case too.

In the foot itself, around a tiny motherboard sit the hard disk, processor, graphics card, and so forth. Graphics are provided by an ATI Radeon 7500 Mobility card - the sort you'll normally only find in a mobile, laptop-style case.

The screen's picture quality isn't brilliant, despite all its technological and aesthetic advantages. It shows a slight curve and some smearing when you scroll quickly, and there's no on-screen display to fiddle with. However, the image is roughly the same size as you'd get on a 17in CRT monitor, crisp enough for office work and comfortable enough with 3D games too. The built-in speakers sound surprisingly sweet, too.

Inside the AJP box lurks a powerful 2.2GHz Pentium 4 processor, backed up by a plentiful 256Mb of fast memory. The slight chink in the armour is the mobile Radeon graphics card. In our 3DMark 2001 tests, the ATI Radeon 7500 Mobility outperforms a 64Mb GeForce2 MX by a decent margin but lags behind the scores of the cracking GeForce4 MX 440. In other words, for the moment the AJP will let you play 3D games, but to really enjoy up and coming titles, you could find yourself wanting more graphics processing power. That said, the ATI does deliver a pleasing Windows XP desktop to the flat screen, and if you're mainly interested in e-mail and word processing, the Radeon 7500 Mobility is actually overkill.

Rounding off the package is a cordless, infra-red keyboard and mouse combination from Logitech. These are nice, consumer-friendly items finished in black, and good looking enough to grace the home or office of a serious 21st-Century professional.

Few people buy a PC just to use it, do they? It has to look cool, sport the latest bits and bobs and sound impressive when you reel off the spec down the pub. The Neo PC scores well here. Techies will be put off by the case, which is inaccessible and largely not upgradeable, but those seeking a no-fuss system, free of clutter and looking like it belongs in the 21st century will be impressed.