Hardware

HP: Touch, Touch, and More Touch

(PC WORLD) - A month ago, HP unveiled a bunch of new Windows 7 PCs, but ones with touchscreens were conspicuous by their absence-and given that HP has been selling TouchSmart models for close to three years now, it would have been startling if it didn’t continue to do so once the touch-enabled Windows 7 debuted.

Tonight, the company announced a second round of Windows 7 machines, including multiple multi-touch TouchSmarts. The new all-in-one touch PCs include the 20? TouchSmart 300, starting at $899, and the 23? TouchSmart 600, starting at $1049; the company is also introducing a refreshed version of the TouchSmart tx2, a $799 laptop with a flip-around 12.1? screen. Those systems are all aimed at consumers, but HP is also going after businesses with the TouchSmart 9100, an all-in-one that starts at $1299 and is meant for applications such as kiosks in public places. It’s even launching the HP LD4200tm, a $2799 touch-screen LCD TV meant for use as digital signage.

I reviewed a nicely loaded $1600 configuration of the TouchSmart 600 for PC World- it runs Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit and has a Core 2 Duo CPU, Blu-Ray, a TV tuner with remote control, a 750GB hard drive, and a lot of other features-basically, it would be a very nice all-in-one PC whether or not it had a touch interface.

But it does do multi-touch, and the most interesting thing about this feature isn’t the hardware aspect, but HP’s software. Windows 7’s support for touch involves making features and functions such as the Start menu, Taskbar, and document scrolling work with a fingertip instead of a mouse. But Microsoft didn’t reinvent Windows to work well with finger-driven input. It didn’t even bundle any applications with the OS that really show off what touch can do.

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