Review: HP TouchSmart IQ810 PC
Ξ October 20th, 2008 | → | ∇ Gadgets |
Although touchscreen is the technology du jour of the mobile phone world and has existed in concept for, well, decades, it has so far failed to make much of an impact on the home PC market. HP is hoping to turn that around with its range of TouchSmart PCs and has just rolled out the latest design: the HP TouchSmart IQ810.
At its core, the IQ810 is a very decent PC, even before you start worrying about the touchscreen part. Hidden neatly out of sight behind the frankly gigantic 25.5″ 1920 x 1200 pixel resolution LCD, there’s a fully Vista-capable assortment of hardware. An Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, 4GB of RAM, 500GB of storage space and an NVIDIA 9600M GPU provide the system with more than enough horsepower to give Vista the oomph it requires and there’s an integrated Blu-ray drive to give you the highest order of entertainment options.
The LCD itself is well up to this task. Apart from the sheer size, it’s beautiful too: bright, crisp, glossy, with rich colours and a decent depth of contrast. In a smallish room it would happily stand in as a normal flat screen TV. It’s equipped with Media Center too so you can plug in an aerial cable and have Windows take on the task of video recording and programming, making the system into a full blown PVR if you so desire.
The new design makes it wall-mountable too, and there’s a few audio outputs, including SPDIF, in case you want to hook up to a larger home cinema stack instead of using the integrated speakers.
The touchscreen was always going to be the make or break for the TouchSmart range. Without beating around the bush, Vista was never really designed with touchscreen in mind - you’ll be better off relying on the included wireless mouse and keyboard and Media Center remote for most ordinary day-to-day tasks. However, HP has done a truly admirable job of making the touchscreen usable and practical by including a special piece of TouchSmart software to make the most of the IQ810’s unique interface.
Hitting the special TouchSmart button in the bottom right of the screen loads up a large, accessible scrolling menu. By dragging your fingers across the screen, you can pull the various icons along until you find the one you want. It’s all completely customisable too, so you drop in programs that you like most and remove the ones you won’t ever use.
When it comes to media, such as MP3 music, MPEG videos or digital photos, it is definitely at its best. Browsing your music collection by navigating through a stack of album covers is just superb and the same system works brilliantly for photos and videos alike. You can choose to browse with folders laid out in grids, or go the more visually impressive fan layout.
It does become a pain when you go from browsing your personal media to watching TV, to find that you’ve left big greasy smears across the screen; but it wipes down easily (you gets a screen cloth in the box too) and even if you only ever used the TouchSmart software as a party piece, it’s going to be extremely handy for browsing through your content and will raise a fair amount of envy, even once your guests discover your secret Belinda Carlisle collection.
In the end, we found shockingly little to complain about - HP has put in a lot of careful thought into the system’s design and come out with a gorgeous, functional and useful gadget, which takes home computing to an exciting new level. Now we just need to work out where we’d put it.
