HP TouchSmart TM2-101ea review

In standard laptop mode things aren't a lot better. For starters, the laptop is top heavy, so trying to use the touchscreen while it's sitting on a desk has the effect that it makes the computer wobble disconcertingly. This makes Windows 7's touch features annoying to use.

Switching to the touchpad's not much better. For this model HP has decided to make the buttons part of the pad. While this may work wonders for design, it makes the TouchSmart incredibly annoying to use. We found that wresting our thumb on the left button, as we would on a normal laptop, just made the cursor jump randomly around the screen. It's a shame that control is so difficult for a laptop that's designed to be incredibly simple to use.

Otherwise, the laptop's pretty good and we're big fans of the keyboard. The keys are all a decent size. We found them comfortable and responsive to use and they're incredibly quiet. Touch typists will find this keyboard very nice to use.

Performance from the 4GB of RAM and dual-core 1.3GHz Intel Pentium U4100 processor were pretty good, with an overall score of 45 in our benchmarks. This means that this computer's more than fine for day-to-day tasks and light image editing, but you'll want something more powerful for video editing.

It's nice to find a dedicated graphics card inside. The ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4550 managed 16fps in our Call of Duty 4 test, although we got playable frame rates by dropping the resolution and detail settings. In other words, you can manage some light gaming on this computer.

Switching to battery automatically switches the laptop to use the onboard Intel graphics chipset (a utility lets you switch manually, too). This is a lot less powerful, but uses less power and helps battery life. Here, we've got nothing to complain about with the TouchSmart lasting an incredible 9h 43m in our light-use test.

This isn't enough to make up for the rest of the package. Ultimately, the TouchSmart is a little too heavy and the screen too hard to see for portrait mode, while the annoying touchpad makes it frustrating to use as a normal laptop. Add in the relatively high price of £800 for the specification and it quickly adds up that this isn't a laptop that's worth bothering with. We'd forgo having a touchscreen in favour of the cheaper Acer Timeline AS1810TZ-413G25N.