The second generation TouchSmart as just a panel PC is gorgeous. The AU$1,999 price is fantastic as well — but we can't help but feel that there's so much more potential in the touchscreen aspect being left, ahem, untapped.
Design and Features
This is HP's second generation touchscreen PC, a great improvement on its first iteration. The new form factor, for a start, pushes into panel PC territory, and looks a treat. HP's byword for the TouchSmart seems to be "simplicity". Mounted around the front of the 22-inch, 1,680x1,050 screen is a built in webcam, as well as a speaker grill along the bottom edge, and a single "home" button above this which launches HP's custom touch interface. Set-up is just as minimal — simply plug in the power adapter, sync the Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and you're away.
One minor niggle is that the keyboard is too simple. We'd love to see an indicator light on the keyboard — any kind of light, whether power, caps lock or otherwise — as when there's issues connecting to the PC it's difficult to ascertain whether it's a battery issue, or a Bluetooth synching issue. To confuse things further, even when the keyboard is not connected to the PC and the batteries are removed, HP's system tray tool will happily tell you that your keyboard is at 100 per cent charge.
Otherwise both keyboard and mouse are fine, the five-button mouse in particular is pleasant to use. The integrated speakers are significantly better than normal fare too, which considering the thinness of the unit makes us wonder why monitor manufacturers have had such issues incorporating decent ones, while HP doesn't bat an eyelid. It's most likely a costing issue in the case of the monitors; however, if that's the case, you'd think they'd cut the feature and focus on improving quality elsewhere. But we digress.
On the left-hand side of the panel arises a curiosity — a button that lights up a white fluorescent tube under the monitor so you can see in the dark when you type, and can be switched off, or cycled through three levels of brightness. Underneath this button is two USB ports, a headphone and line-in jack, while further back under a removable panel are three more USB ports, an Ethernet jack, digital audio out (in the form of an RCA jack) and audio line out. The opposite side features the power button, a DVD±RW drive, volume controls, SD/MMC/MS/xD card reader and a FireWire port, while internally Bluetooth and 802.11n are offered.
The screen is raised slightly off desk level, allowing the keyboard to be neatly tucked underneath and effectively hidden from sight. Unfortunately, it's not quite high enough to admit a keyboard that has had its legs extended — you'll have to tuck them in before pushing it through.
Software
A point of annoyance — upon first load, the TouchSmart continuously made the Windows "Start navigation" noise (the click sound that's made, for example, when you open a page in Internet Explorer). While we worked around it by switching off the Start navigation effect in the Sound control panel, we had less luck finding the rogue application that was the cause of the noise, something that's hopefully fixed soon.
While the TouchSmart uses Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit for its operating system, it also has HP's own touch interface available for use — and is quite enjoyable to use. While it only understands basic multi-touch, it's otherwise quite fun and for the most part, well thought out. Things can get a little laggy, especially when using the calendar for booking appointments, and we can only assume this is either because it features a completely underpowered Intel GMA 3000 as the graphics card, or doesn't support GPU acceleration at all.
The touchscreen beeps whenever you touch it — a low pitch for one finger, a higher one for two. This can be turned off if found annoying, and interestingly, doesn't beep at all when using HP's TouchSmart interface, only in Windows Vista.
The initial interface is broken up into two rows, one "large" set of scrollable application tiles for your frequently used programs, and a smaller strip down the bottom for lesser used ones. You can drag and drop using your finger to reorder these icons either in the one strip or between them, and a simple tap of an icon loads that program. The bottom row features a number of links to Windows games, a clock, weather, RSS feeds, and an embedded version of Internet Explorer, whereas the top strip gives access to Music, Videos, Calendar, Pictures and Notes, a Post-It note style application that allows you to draw with your fingers, use handwriting recognition for text, or keep voice notes.
There's a whole host of missed opportunities here though — there is multi-touch capability, but it's limited to the home screen where it uselessly scales your menu options, and photos miss out. Although the interface will allow you to browse through folders in an iPod-touch-esque manner, there's no such treatment once you enter the folder, only allowing you to view gallery style, and while it supplies some buttons for rotating, recolouring and so forth, there's no multi-touch way to rotate, zoom or sort images.
The included music player is fun and easy to use, and can even use your iTunes playlist if you want it to, but the lack of an on-screen volume control is a bit of a downer. Also, the option to run music in a public jukebox mode allows you to add more to a playlist, but not delete or shuffle which will hamper its effect as an otherwise excellent source of party music. You can set a song playing and then leave the music player to do other things, and it will keep playing in the background until you hit the always present pause control, it just seems a bit odd that the aforementioned volume control isn't omnipresent as well.
The video section is similar in function to the photo gallery, but if you've previously set a song playing in the background, it's not smart enough to pause it when you playback a movie. From here you can also record webcam movies if you desire, which are stored in WMV format — however, there's absolutely no way to delete them within the confines of the interface — you have to exit and find the relevant folder in Windows Explorer.
The video section also gets slightly out of control if you've got a lot of movies to sort through, and we found ourselves pining for a better organised interface. The "Dates" view for instance, is only really useful if you're the type that's only storing personal videos, or who takes a video blog. Otherwise, it'll get polluted with other content you may have downloaded.
The "Folder" view is also an issue, which doesn't so much allow for navigation as shows the individual folders the interface has discovered with videos in them. Problems start to arise in this mode if you've been slightly fastidious about organising your video content. For example, say you had a folder called Season 1, stored under another folder called Red vs Blue. Say you had another folder called Season 1, but this time it's stored under a folder called Pure Pwnage. Both different video series makes sense from a file organisation standpoint — however, HP's interface will only list both Season 1 folders, with no context about where they're stored, making navigation guesswork at best.
Slightly better is the "Videos" mode, which simply shows all catalogued video files in a similar manner to the "tiles" view in Windows Explorer. While this allows quicker identification of movies than the Folder view (assuming the file is named correctly, as a thumbnail is included), if you're in possession of quite a few movies the consistent drag motions required to scroll through them all can get tiring.
Finally, while the calendar allows you to tap and create an event, you can't then drag that event simply to another day, week or month — you have to double tap the existing event to edit it, and then change the day manually using the drop down calendar on the right-hand side.
All of these are only minor points, but it's painful to see obvious things overlooked, and they're magnified by the fact that a touch interface is meant to be flexible, integrated, intuitive and simple.
In truth, if we hadn't seen what the iPod Touch and Microsoft's concept Surface table could do, this would all be pretty amazing. A number of companies are now piling money into research in order to fill the touch void, with the vision being that there'll soon be many public facing screens used as either an information resource, control system, or both. Things are certainly heating up in this arena, and should Windows 7 be any good and the multi-touch support being built into the OS follow suit, then the next TouchSmart PC could be very interesting indeed.
On the crapware side, things are reasonably thin for a change — although advertising has taken a new height with the Welcome Center graphic being seized by Norton, pleading that you really, really, really should protect your machine with its software. We turned it off.
AOL is still the tie-in search partner, and there's still the usual slapdash of trials installed, in this case casual games and Microsoft Office 2007 — while we wholeheartedly recommend the complete uninstallation of all of this, we do wonder if all this partnering is part of what keeps PC hardware low in price.
Turn over to see performance review and verdict.
3%
5%
Stunning piece of computer that can sit proudly in any family room
The good: All-in-one computer with a nice user interface.
The bad: Should also include a digital TV tuner built-in.