You know the sort of thing: you look up a recipe on the BBC website and get busy making pesto and grilling aubergines while listening to the latest Arctic Monkeys album and, as you move around the kitchen, you keep tabs on your email and Twitter accounts.

The stand doubles-up as a carry handle

Even if that does happen to be your bag – it certainly isn’t ours – you’ll find it tricky to do so with such a poor screen and a system that suffers from the burden of Windows Vista. The idea of a smart, integrated all-in-one has a certain appeal but we found that it was essential to plug in a mouse and keyboard to drive Windows as the touchscreen is little more than a gimmick. It works but it isn’t good for much besides clicking on links in web pages and selecting bookmarks from your list of Favourites. There’s an on-screen keyboard tucked away in the Accessibility section of Windows' Start menu that you can use for simple tasks such as tapping in a URL but it’s a painfully slow process.

Jonathon Ive will not be losing sleep tonight

We may have given the impression that we don’t much like the Shuttle X5000TA but that’s not entirely true. It’s a smart PC that is very tidy and amazingly quiet in operation, no doubt thanks to the low power characteristics of Atom and the Intel 945G chipset. The problem is that you cannot use it on the move and neither can you use it to watch movies and while that doesn’t quite make it useless we fail to see why anyone would spend £535 on a the X5000TA when they could buy a perfectly decent laptop instead.

Verdict

The Shuttle X5000TA reminds us of the Starck-designed Alessi juicer. The Shuttle's not a design classic, but like the juicer it doesn’t work very well in the real world. And it’s too expensive. ®

More Mini PC Reviews...

Asus Eee Box B206

Shuttle X27D

Advent AIO-100

Shuttle XPC SP45H7