Mesh Cute

There's a classic Alan Partridge sketch in which the fictionalNorwich 'personality' browses hi-fis in a branch of Dixons. "Nice action" hesays, as the CD tray purrs open. Partridge doesn't care about the soundor features, just the smoothness with which the CD drive opens andcloses.

On this basis, Alan Partridge would hate the Mesh Cute.Opening the Blu-ray/DVD-RW drive had a "nice action." But when weclosed it, the tray got caught on the front flap, sending the driveinto a can't-quite-open-can't-quite-close spasm, like a Terminatorcaught in a lift door.

Is the Cute cute? It's small, but smallthings aren't necessarily cute. I don't think anyone's ever described aparasitic worm, as 'cute'. The Cute's about the size of a shoebox,fronted with a flimsy plastic fascia. And even the merest touch of thefront sends the DVD drive flying open, such is the thinness of theplastic. Not all that cute, then.

Inside, Mesh has done a fairenough job of packing a lot of components into a bespoke space. Thetiny, Mini-ITX motherboard takes laptop-style RAM and has onboardgraphics with an inspiring array of outputs: VGA, DVI and HDMI. It alsohas onboard sound with all the multichannel trimmings, and comes with –incongruently – a 64-bit installation of Windows Vista.

We arequite concerned about Mesh's decision to place the PSU at the front ofthe machine – the area with the least amount of ventilation – and theCute certainly seemed to generate a lot of heat. This moves it from'cute' to 'hawt' in the lingo of what girls say about boys in AmericanTV shows. Not in a good way. The Cute also chucks out a hell of a lotof noise; about as much as an Xbox 360, so if you owned both this andthe Microsoft console, you could probably drown out the mother-in-law.

Interms of performance, the Cute is just about okay. Mesh deserves somekudos for chucking a Blu-ray drive into the package. With itsadditional TV tuner card and wireless keyboard and mouse, the Cuteset-up seems to be aimed squarely at people who want to use a PC withtheir HD telly. Provided you keep the Cute out of sight, so no one cansee its hideous plastic frontage, by burying it in a small hole in yourliving room, or hiding it inside a dog, it'll go quite nicely as amedia centre set up.

Inevitably, the words 'media centre'translate as 'you can forget about playing games on this, boyo. Youmight as well chuck your Steam account into the sun.' Gaming is adefinite no-no, and although the graphics chip was able to display aBlu-ray perfectly, it won't handle anything but the lowest of games.One for the World of Warcraft players, then.

The mosthideous element of the Cute is the price. At £200 it would have beenacceptable, but at £400 it's ridiculous. You can now pick up aPlayStation 3 and some games for that price, or an Xbox 360 and evenmore games. Or, you can get a semi-decent £300 Core 2 PC and bung agraphics card in it – the Cute's single PCI-express slot is alreadyfilled with the TV tuner. But, most importantly, all of thesealternatives are guaranteed to have optical drives with 'nice actions'.