Dell Releases The XPS 18. A Monster of a PC That is Also a Tablet

There’s a new tablet in town, but it’s not quite what you’d expect. Meet the Dell XPS 18 All-in-One, a desktop computer with an 18.4-inch screen – that you can carry around, slate style!

Announced at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas this week, the Dell XPS 18 takes more than a few cues from Asus’ insane all-in-one-slash-Android-tablet. Plonk it on your desk, and it acts as a regular Windows 8 machine with a touchscreen you can prod your way around, powered by an Intel Core low power processor.

Need to leave the study? No problem. You can simply pick the Dell XPS 18 up and carry it around away from the mains. It’s got a kickstand built in for both standing tall and shallow, and weighs just over two kilograms – not too shabby for something so large. It doesn’t boot into Android like Asus’ monster, but Windows is now finger friendly, so it’s no bad thing.

Right now, Dell is keeping schtum on everything from price to release date, but we’ll keep you clued in as soon as details hit. In the meantime, let us know what you make of the concept in the comments below. Would you ever use a tablet this big? [Source]

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Newest 27" iMac's SSD, Fusion and HDD Flavour Drives Benchmarked

The folks at Bare Feats have put together a handy look at the performance of four of the five storage options available when custom ordering a new 27-inch iMac through Apple. These include a 1 TB and 3 TB hard disk (a 7200 RPM Seagate Barracuda), 768 GB solid state drive and 1 TB Fusion Drive. Their results with the latter are pretty impressive, but come with a noteworthy caveat.

In their testing, Bare Feet found that the SSD option obviously performs best, offering a throughput of 440 MB/s when writing large files and 477 MB/s when reading large files. Small random transfers hit 208 MB/s when writing and 140 MB/s when reading. By comparison, the Fusion Drive managed 325 MB/s when writing large files and 482 MB/s when reading them (127 MB/s and 129 MB/s when writing/reading small files, respectively). The Fusion Drive saw a substantial (nearly 50%) decrease in transfer speed when attempting to move files larger than the free space on the drive's "fused" SSD portion, however.

As for the traditional hard disk options, they performed about as well as you'd expect. You can check out the full benchmarks on Bare Feats -- a recommended read for anyone thinking of boing built-to-order. [TUAW]

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