Among HP's many announcements at CES was this beauty: the HP TouchSmart IQ770 PC. HP's first all-in-one PC sports a unique, slick-looking industrial design, one which puts the slot loading DVD burner and media card slots at the front, along with dedicated disc playback buttons, and a host of port upfront, and audio-visual ports along the side of the base on the left.
Beyond its pretty, sleek and shiny black looks, the unit sets itself apart by offering a 19-inch touchscreen display.
While I love having a touchscreen display on a handheld or a notebook, I can't say I'm as enamored of it for daily computing tasks. Rather, I can see the appeal of the touchscreen not for selecting the Microsoft Word icon (I fear that after doing this enough times, my arm muscles will ache from the strain), but for navigating around entertainment options-television recordings, music--without entering into "PC-user mode".
For that, the TouchSmart PC--whose design screams for it to be a living-centric piece as opposed to a beige box concealed under the debris of your home office desk--gets bonus points for including the touchscreen display.
The basic specs on this unit: AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual-Core TL-52 Processor, 2GB of RAM, a 320GB hard disk drive, slot-loading SuperMulti DVD burner with LightScribe, nVidia GeForce Go 7600 graphics with 256MB of dedicated video meory, and a 1.3 megapixel Web cam. The TouchSmart PC will ship by end of month, with Windows Vista Premium.
