Another quick review, this time of the second and much better iteration of the HP Touchsmart. This new one comes with a 22inch screen and looks very like the iMac with pretty much everything built into and behind the screen. Full optical drive. Being all about thin/thick, this PC is 2.6 inches thick, has half a terrabyte of storage, 2.16Ghz processor, Wifi and all that jazz.
Oh and did we mention it does touch? We were waiting for “I touch myself” to play during them showing off the interface but they played some good pop-punk-like song about touching. If you’ve used the touch interface on the iPhone then you know how it works. Flick through photos, play songs, drag stuff around. However it’s still very very basic. No copying and pasting functionality. Only inside the HP TouchSmart software can this functionality work. Big shame.
It’s still rough too in that you have to use the keyboard for copying and pasting and inside the music player you can’t adjust the volume. That’s hardware only. That seems a massive oversight.
Overall giving this a three because of the limited/restricted use for the touch interface which I hope changes over time but on pushing HP about opening up their Touch “platform”, it seems management won’t allow an SDK or API for it. Hello? Imagine every Facebook developer making apps for this? I’d love to see a child’s game made for this for people to play over the net. Get kids playing each other etc. Or fathers and daughters playing online when they are oceans apart.