HP TouchSmart PC IQ770 review

While no self-respecting sci-fi film is complete without a touchscreen PC, youfll rarely see one in real-life outside of a supermarket or print-your-own photo booth.

Given that Windows wasn't designed to be prodded at, that's not really surprising. But with its huge R&D budget and four years of development, HP is trying to change that. And after all the failed attempts we've seen over the years, we're astounded to say that it's actually been worth the wait the HP TouchSmart IQ770 is an impressive beast.

Twist and touch

It's designed around an all-in-one case, with all the computer bits tucked away in the base. A vertical stand rises up from the front, with the screen double-hinged onto that. It's adjustable, so you can use it either standing up or sitting down. The screen itself is a 19in widescreen with a resolution of 1440 x 900 enough for 720p HD video. It doesn't suffer from any of the graininess often seen with touch-sensitive screens as there's no obtrusive conductive metal grid or membrane. Instead HP has employed infrared detectors hidden around the bezel. It's an incredibly responsive arrangement and works without you even fully touching it.

While the hardware is nothing too revolutionary, the masterstroke is the work that HP has put into the software. Vista's Media Centre interface works well with a touchscreen anyway, but it's been added to in the form of HP's SmartCenter software, which runs within it. Press the ehome button on bottom right of the screen bezel and SmartCenter pops into view.

There's space for up to 12 items, such as a time or weather panel, but you can also assign any program or web page that you like. If you've ever used a photo kiosk, you'll soon feel right at home. In fact, one of the available applications, Photosmart Touch, turns the IQ770 into just that pop a card into the integrated media card reader, tick the photos you want and just touch print. There's room for a printer behind the screen and most small models will then output their prints directly under the screen.

Get in the kitchen

HP claims that the kitchen is one of the best places for the IQ770 and that makes a certain degree of sense. The SmartCalendar program is designed to replace the fridge door/corkboard, allowing you to create virtual sticky notes or leave voice messages for other household members using the built-in microphone a light on the front of the unit will flash to remind you of an event.

Inside the TouchSmart, HP has used a mix of desktop and laptop parts. The processor is a mobile AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-52 and its benchmark score of 99% shows that it's perfectly able, particularly with the luxurious 2GB of RAM that's also installed. It's dual-core and kept up with all our demanding testing while remaining cool enough to not need noisy fans. There's also a graphics card inside, albeit one from a laptop an nVidia GeForce Go 7600. It won't blow the latest 3D games out of the water, but it will happily render all of Vista's swishy Desktop effects and it managed a quite reasonable 39% in our Call of Duty 2 benchmark.

Hooked up

As a thoroughly modern PC, there's the faster flavour of wired networking Gigabit Ethernet and wireless LAN, with the aerial hidden away in the screen. There's also Bluetooth, should you need it, as well as integrated infrared and radio frequency (RF) receivers the latter for the wireless mouse and keyboard, both of which are a cut above the usual bundled offerings.