Viewsonic VOT550 Mini PC Review : Affordable Yet Feature Packed

We couldn't find the VOT550 on sale at any online retailer in the UK which is really a shame but we've been informed that the suggested retail price of the top of the range model will be only £499, a price that we will need to confirm given that its little brother, the VOT530 costs £434 at Scan and comes with half the memory, a 160GB hard disk drive and "only" a DVD writer.

Dell also has a potent competitor, the ZinoHD, which is powered by a significantly less powerful AMD processor (but more capable X3200 chipset) and costs around £599.

The real threat however comes from Nvidia ION based products like the Acer Aspire Revo R3610 which come with a lesser processor and lacks a few crucial features but cost almost half the price.

As for the future, we expect Viewsonic to release a follow up to the VOT550 later this year with the GP7A-BDR barebone chassis instead.

This one will come with the Nvidia ION chipset, a card reader, a serial COM port (???), both HDMI and D-Sub ports (but not DVI). All in all, a great little powerhouse that is let down only by a few easily solved issues, the most irritating one being the quasi complete lack of stock at any popular online retailers in the UK.

Find out more about the VOH150 here.

(Update : We've also been informed, albeit a bit late, that the VOT550 has been EOLed by Viewsonic and will be superseded by the soon to come VOT560 which might look like the one in the picture below.)