Maximum PC touchsmart RSS Feed

HP Launches Series of Touch-Enabled Laptops, All-in-Ones

Paul Lilly — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:42:09 -0500

The busy bodies at HP kicked off this week with a series of product launches, including several multi-touch capable laptops that work with Microsoft's upcoming Windows 7 OS.

"We introduced our first touchscreens in 1983 and now we're on our third generation of TouchSmart models," said John Cook, vice president of desktop marketing in HP's Personal Systems Group. "Touch may very well be the best way to interact with a computer."

That last statement will be up to consumers to decide, and to help them do that, HP's TouchSmart tx2 laptop ($799) allows consumers to use two fingers to navigate through the touchscreen interfaces. Like HP's TouchSmart desktops, the tx2 comes with the abiltiy to pinch, rotate, flip, press, or drag a finger across the screen. And the 12.1-inch screen can be rotated 180 degrees for use as a tablet.

HP paid attention to the desktop market as well, releasing its third generation of touch-enabled desktop PCs. Both the all-in-one TouchSmart 300 and 600 sport widescreen displays sized 20 inches and 23 inches, respectively. Both also come with built-in touch apps, including Hulu Desktop, Netflix, Pandora, Twitter, and the HP Music Store by Rhapsody.

VentureBeat has the full scoop here.

image Credit: VentureBeat

HP Reveals WiFi Enabled Photosmart Premium Printer With Web-Connected Touchpanel

Andy Salisbury — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:59:37 -0500

Recently HP announced their brand spankin’ new HD Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web, allowing users to print web content straight from the printer.

The Photosmart’s TouchSmart Web UI system works on a 4-inch widescreen panel that features a row of thumbnails that you flick through in order to access what you wish to print. It also comes with an open API, allowing any web content developer to create their own widgets.

HP expects that the new Photosmart will revolutionize and “change the way people think about printing.” Typical taglines, but for those interested, the printer is WiFi enabled, can copy, scan and fax, and will cost $399.

Image Credit: HP

HP TouchSmart IQ506t

Michael Brown — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 22:00:00 -0600

HP’s TouchSmart line of all-in-one desktop computers has undergone quite a transformation since we examined the very first model, the IQ770, nearly two years ago. Not only is every change for the better, but HP has managed to slash prices by several hundred dollars.

The formfactor is the most obvious change to the TouchSmart line: The IQ770 was like a monitor stuck on top of a pizza box; the new series looks like an oversize picture frame. Apple, Dell, and Gateway have all taken this tack with their all-in-one offerings, but HP’s engineers also designed the TouchSmart like an easel. By using three feet to support the computer, the company was able to carry over the IQ770’s handy keyboard garage concept (providing a space below the CPU for keyboard storage), but it’s impossible to casually adjust this display’s tilt angle. We loved the fact that we could use the IQ770 while either sitting or standing, but you can’t stand in front of the IQ506 unless it’s on a bar-height counter.

HP sells three preconfigured TouchSmart models. We reviewed the middle offering—the $1,500 IQ506t—which features a 22-inch touch-screen, a 2.16GHz mobile Intel Core2 Duo CPU, a discrete videocard, and a 500GB hard drive.

The TouchSmart achieves its impressively thin profile (it’s just three inches thick) by using many components that were designed for notebook PCs, including an external power supply. This helps keep the rig cool and extremely quiet at the expense of performance, at least when compared to a conventional desktop rig. You need to find a good hiding place for that brick, too.

The TouchSmart’s main attractions, its touch screen and the user interface associated with it, have been radically improved. The screen supports multi-touch gestures, for instance, and the user interface can display an unlimited number of tiles (which serve the same function as shortcut icons in the Windows GUI). The silly three-slot limit on user-created tiles has also been eliminated. HP doesn’t make much use of multi-touch features at this point, though; you can use two fingers to resize tiles, but that’s about it. HP got rid of the stylus, but there’s no need to worry about fingerprints smeared all over that huge LCD. The screen is covered by a sheet of protective glass that the documentation says can be cleaned with “typical household glass cleaner.”

The keyboard is a vast improvement over the one that shipped with the IQ770; it feels very solid and delivers excellent tactile feedback while being just a half-inch thick. HP augmented the Analog Devices SoundMax HD-audio chip with signal-processing software from Sonic Focus to deliver much-improved audio.

The TouchSmart application software is a mixed bag: The music and video programs aren’t terrible, but the photo editor is far too basic and the calendar can’t synchronize with a smartphone (it will, however, automatically sync with Windows Vista Calendar. Woo hoo!).

We’ll sum up by repeating what we said about the first-generation TouchSmart: It would be a big mistake to make the IQ506t your one-and-only PC: It’s just not powerful enough for gaming, heavy-duty photo or video editing, or many other enthusiast applications. But it is an absolutely fabulous family computer and media center.

HP TouchSmart IQ770

Michael Brown — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 19:22:41 -0500

When HP designed the TouchSmart IQ770, it must have been thinking of that old saying, “No matter where I serve my guests, it seems they like the kitchen best.” This PC is tailor made for serving up—and scarfing down—digital media in the kitchen.

By combining the keyboard-free convenience and built-in display of a tablet PC with the I/O ports and features of a media-center desktop computer, the company has created a unique machine. We’d be even more excited about the IQ770 if HP had created software that took better advantage of its capabilities. But let’s examine its positive attributes first because there are many.

The 19-inch widescreen display makes this machine look massive, but it measures just 14.5 inches wide and 10 inches deep at its base (the motherboard tray extends an additional two inches, left and right, over the base). You’ll need 22.5 inches of width and between 16 and 19 inches of height (with the display fully elevated) to accommodate the entire unit, but we set it up on a bar-height, 27-inch-square table in our kitchen and had just enough room for two plates of spaghetti and two glasses of Chianti (this with the wireless keyboard parked in its garage beneath the CPU tray). Cozy, but doable. And the TouchSmart is blissfully quiet.

The machine ships with Windows Vista Home Premium, which integrates both Tablet PC functionality and Windows Media Center, so you can use one fingertip to control the entire machine. We recommend using the provided stylus, however; who wants to stare at a screen covered with fingerprints? The touch screen was usually very responsive and accurate, but there were times when the machine would beep in response to a stylus tap and then do nothing. On other occasions, a tap would activate the window behind the one we were trying to manipulate. These anomalies, however infrequent, will confuse novice users and annoy experts until they grow accustomed to the machine’s response times.

We found the touch screen particularly useful for web browsing, assuming your favorite sites are bookmarked and you don’t need to search. When tapping won’t cut it, you can wield a wireless keyboard, a two-button scroll-wheel mouse, or a TV-style remote control. (The former two use RF, the latter IR.) The display itself is very bright but also highly reflective—particularly when you’re working in a dark room.

We got a kick out of walking up to the machine and using it like a kiosk, and we can easily visualize it as the information hub for a busy family home; it’s far better suited to such a task than an inexpensive laptop would be. We’re more than a little disappointed, however, in HP’s TouchSmart software. HP SmartCenter looks as though it could be customized to boil the entire user interface down to a dozen hyperlinks. The UI features three large buttons and up to nine smaller ones; we set the three large buttons to display important information: the current date (with a link to the HP SmartCalendar), the time (with a link to two additional time zones), and the current weather conditions (with a link to a weather forecast).

But when we went to customize the other nine buttons, we encountered a nonsensical roadblock: Most of them serve fixed functions. You can choose to display or hide a button, but you’re given just three fully customizable buttons. You can’t change the photo-editing button, for instance, to launch Photoshop Elements instead of HP’s very limited PhotoSmart Touch. You can create a new button to do that, but remember, you have only three slots. What’s worse is that while you can change the home page that the Internet button navigates to, you’ll have to use another of those three slots if you’d prefer Firefox to display that page instead of Internet Explorer.

We appreciate the HP SmartCalendar’s ability to maintain schedules for both individuals and groups, but why can’t it synchronize with our increasingly ubiquitous smartphones? Meanwhile, the novelty of scrawling handwritten notes and recording voice memos within HP SmartCalendar wears off quickly.

Most of the IQ770’s I/O ports are up front, so the only cord sticking out of the back of our test unit was the power cable. This enabled us to push the whole shebang tight against a wall. We’d like to have more than just two USB 2.0 ports up front (there’s a IEEE-1394 port here, too), but four more are in the back. The backplane also hosts a gigabit Ethernet port, mini-VGA output, 5.1-channel analog audio output (1/8-inch stereo connectors), a 5.1-channel digital audio output (coaxial), an IR output, and a second IEEE-1394 port.

HP’s TouchSmart IQ770 could never serve as our primary PC—we knew going into this review that it wouldn’t compete with our zero-point reference platform, and it’s clearly not designed for hardcore gaming—but we’d rather have multiple PCs dedicated to particular tasks than one machine that’s crappy at everything. This one has definitely earned a place in our dream kitchen.