Calis

Business Times, Biz IT - 25 Jan 2007

HP goes family friendly with new touch screen PC

By WINSTON CHAI



COMPUTER giant Hewlett-Packard hopes to secure a spot at the nerve centre of the digital home with a new product which could spell the end of messy sticky notes and fridge magnets.

At a media event in Seoul yesterday, the company took the wraps off its TouchSmart PC, a new computer that is designed to take advantage of the touch screen and voice recognition capabilities of Microsoft's upcoming Windows Vista operating system.

Developed jointly by HP and the Redmond software giant, the TouchSmart desktop is touted to be a user-friendly multimedia entertainment hub for the family.

It promises one-touch access to a host of applications like shared calendars, music, movies and digital photos.

This is achieved by incorporating HP's own SmartCenter software alongside Windows Vista. By running SmartCenter, consumers will be provided with a range of large icons and customisable shortcuts to access frequently-used tools.

For example, the calendaring tool within SmartCenter allows family members to scrawl virtual sticky notes for each other with their fingers or a digital pen, much like how one would do it using paper and fridge magnets. Users can also drag and drop these postings onto an on-screen calendar.

Despite its family-friendly features, the TouchSmart PC packs in some serious hardware underneath its blackhood.

It is powered by an AMD Turion 64X2 processor, coupled with 2GB of RAM, 320GB of hard disk storage space which can be further expanded using HP's removable storage feature called Pocket Media Drive.

It is bundled with a 19-inch touch screen monitor with a built-in 1.3 megapixel camera and microphone.

On the graphics front, the TouchSmart PC sports an Nvidia GeForce Go 7600 card, as well as a host of multimedia bells and whistles.

These include an integrated TV and radio tuner, wireless keyboard and laser mouse, as well as support for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity.

The TouchSmart PC will be launched in the second quarter of this year at an estimated price of US$2,499.

A version powered by Intel processors will be released in the near future, according to Andy Wong, HP's product manager for its Personal SystemsGroup in the Asia-Pacific region.

scorpio

Well, i wont go for HP thing le...its bad...either in product or after sale services,.
even my friend working inside Hp also said like that.....damn terrible.

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CUte MaH?

littleway

If tablet pc still ok la...At least it lies on top of the table. It looks stupid when we poking at the display on the table which stands infront of us.

Hotate

There are other operating systems with touchscreen capabilities much better than that of Vista, and available much more earlier, in terms of years as well. All you need to do is to purchase a good touch screen capable monitor, you can easily google or yahoo for a few.

HP is just trying to sell products off a tellytubby operating system. And mind you, with optimal configuration and good polishing, i've had Windows hang on me, at least more than 50 times in all the time i've used computers. [Inclusive of Vista RC 1, at work]

I've had unix based operating systems hang on me less than 5 times in my life.

[Provided we assume that it's regular use, not heavy multitasking. If we consider heavy multitasking, that number for Windows is well over 70]