A Vista PC for the rest of the house

 

HP built its new all-in-one desktop, the TouchSmart IQ770 ($1,800), with your kitchen in mind, as well as your family room, dining room, bedroom ... you get the idea. Loaded with features that emphasize entertainment and family living, it’s also the first PC we've gotten with Windows Vista preinstalled.   

The TouchSmart has more connections than we've seen yet on a home computer, including six USB ports, two FireWire ports, Bluetooth, Ethernet, and Wi-Fi (a, b, and g). For watching TV and listening to music, there's an analog A/V input, analog and digital surround sound out, analog and digital (HD) TV tuners, a remote control, and an FM radio tuner. 

At the heart of this PC is the HP SmartCenter, a convenient touch-screen user interface that borrows a lot of its look and feel from Windows Media Center, within which it runs. The main screen shows time, date, local weather, and a small slideshow of your pictures. From here, you can launch other functions, such as TV and music players, using just your finger on the 19-inch, 1440x900-pixel monitor. You can also jump to the normal Media Center interface, drop to the Windows desktop, or use a Web browser. 

There’s a family message center that uses electronic “sticky-notes” to communicate and remind. You can also record your voice or draw onto notes and attach them to calendar dates. There were a few rough edges; it was a bit slow to launch, and we couldn’t play a voice-note directly from the calendar, but the program could be useful. 

The TouchSmart’s Vista Home Premium OS runs in full Aero mode, transparent windows and all. You can operate this PC with your finger thanks to a screen mode that expands the size of buttons, icons, and control elements on the screen, even on normal Windows programs. The SmartCenter interface even lets you pop up a keyboard on the screen for one-letter-at-a-time text entry into notes, but the keys are arranged in alphabetical order rather than the traditional QWERTY layout. 

Though adequately sensitive to our fingers, the touch-screen was sometimes off target, and there wasn’t a way to recalibrate it, as far as we could find (though we're still looking), but we got used to the quirks. You can tilt the glossy screen up and down to fit underneath a cabinet. But you can't turn the screen to avoid glare, or rotate it to the left and right, an inconvenience if you want to watch TV while cooking on the stove. It proved fairly resistant to fingerprints, and could easily be wiped. 

The TouchSmart takes up a lot of countertop space, similar to a large microwave oven, measuring about 22 inches wide, 14 inches deep, and 18 inches high. You can store the wireless keyboard under the front panel (but not the wireless mouse), and there’s enough space behind the screen to fit a snapshot printer, with the prints coming out through a slot below the screen. 

TV pictures looked good, with a bit of the noise artifacts common to PC-based TV images. Through the Media Center features, you can record and store programs, and pause and rewind live TV. Speakers lacked bass but otherwise sounded good. Waking up the computer from sleep mode took only a few seconds, one of the improvements Vista provides over XP. 

The TouchSmart, as with most HP PCs we’ve tested recently, is loaded with promotional software from HP and its commercial partners. Fortunately, you can uninstall it and remove unwanted icons and links. HP supplies a 60-day antivirus subscription, and a number of content-creation and editing applications. But it’s not set up for home office work; you’ll need to install some productivity apps for that. 

To see how well it would handle a sophisticated PC game, we installed Quake 4. It was eminently playable, if not quite as smooth as the high-end gamer PCs we’ve tested. But the TouchSmart is a powerful PC, and seems to pack in a lot of features for the price. It runs on a Turion 64 X2 processor with 2 GB of RAM. Other specs include Nvidia GeForce Go 7600 512 MB graphics, a 300 GB hard drive, DVD-RW, memory card reader, microphone, wireless keyboard and mouse, and a bay for HP’s accessory Pocket Media Drive that can serve as a backup drive. 

As far as using it in the kitchen, we just wonder how long the keyboard will last before crumbs start getting embedded under the keys! 

— Dean Gallea

Comments

[Drew]

Calibrating the screen can be done via the control panel. Also, there is an on screen keyboard for when you are outside of SmartCenter, as part of the Tablet PC functionality that is included with Vista. It has the traditional QWERTY layout, however the buttons are a tad small for finger presses, though work well when used with the stylus.