All-in-One PCs Take Aim at the Kitchen

The Cozi home page.

The Studio One 19 comes in five colors

The latter is so crucial to households that Cozi invested considerable time and money to make it easier to find school listings. The company also built an interface and Internet infrastructure to import them into a family calendar. Otherwise, says Cape, "I'd guess that fewer than 1 percent of Americans could figure it out." Cozi comes as a featured service on the Dell Studio all-in-ones, and the combination actually works. After a couple of weeks, a kitchen PC and Cozi start to feel like an integral part of daily planning.

The Dell Studio One 19 itself is bigger, more powerful, and pricier than many of the new household PCs. List prices start at $700 for models with 18.4-inch screens, which might prove too large for many tight kitchens. But the PC includes a DVD player and enough muscle to act as a kitchen TV. And it packs enough power to be a family's primary computer, says Dell's Duncan. "We don't want you to have to run to the office if you want to do some real computing."

A more expensive version of the Dell, at $870, comes with a touch screen. Many analysts consider that crucial to kitchen PCs, where a keyboard would consume valuable counter space. A keyboard isn't needed for many simple tasks, such as calling up weather forecasts or music playlists. Other nettop makers are answering with smaller touch-screen models that pack less power than Dell's to keep the cost down. An example is Asus's 15.6-inch Eee Top, which is already selling for less than $500.

[Learn more about the Asus Eee Top.]

Other competitors suggest the jury is still out on the usefulness of fingering a screen, particularly at the $100 premium it typically brings. "A touch screen is great on a CNN stage when explaining election results. But how useful [it is] at home is not quite clear at this stage," says Averatec CEO Tae-Hyun "Tiger" Cho.

Averatec instead puts the premium into larger screens, with an 18.4-inch model that's selling for less than $500. Keeping prices down is the key to the success of the new nettops, and to reviving a desktop market that's been losing market share to notebooks, Cho says. Desktops have lost their luster. "Something has to happen in the desktop market to change that," he says.