HP Touchsmart IQ816 PC
Brief Review
Quite frankly, the whole touch screen on a computer up until now seemed impractical to me. I may have just changed my mind, sort of. When you open up the HP Touchsmart IQ816 PC box, the feeling is of excitement. For this unit is not only slick in design, but rugged and well built. Slightly heavy (35.28 lbs approx), but nothing the well designed adjustable rear stand can’t handle.
Very reminiscent of an Apple iMac, the computer feels a whole lot different than your typical all in one PC’s. Very elegant and modern lines.
The TouchSmart IQ816 runs on a Core 2 Duo T8100 2.1 GHz with 4 GB of RAM, and a 750GB hard drive. The Built in Display is a 25.5-inch flat panel display capable of 1920 x 1200 resolution. Want to know more? Lets get to the spec’s first….
Product: HP Touchsmart IQ816 PC
Author: Jose Perez
Published on: December 8th 2008
Product cost: Range $1,949.99 – $2,099.99
Manufacturer: HP
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Planetx64 Staff
{mospagebreak title=Specifications}
2.1 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T8100 with 3MB L2 Cache
- 4GB PC2-5300 DDR2 SDRAM memory (2x2048MB)
- 750GB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s hard drive
- NVIDIA GeForce 9600 M GS HD graphics module with 512MB dedicated video memory and support for Blu-ray, and Microsoft DirectX 10
- Slot-load Blu-ray player and SuperMulti DVD burner
- Wireless LAN 802.11b/g/n with built-in WLAN antenna and Integrated Bluetooth
- Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium, dims in inches: 26.04" (W) x 5.47" (L/D) x 19.63" (H) approx., 35.28 lbs approx.
{mospagebreak title=Pros and Cons}
Pros:
- CPU Performance
- Video Display/Card
- Storage
- TouchScreen
This computer has plenty of CPU and video card horsepower to drive multimedia and graphics oriented applications, as well as for moderate gaming purposes. The 25.5 inch Display is just stunning. There is plenty of storage room with the included 750 GB hard drive. Most importantly though, is the new touch interaction with the screen. At first it seemed like it would only come in handy with the pre-built UI menu system. However, after dropping back into the regular operating system, I was pleased at how well single tapping, double tapping and dragging worked, most of the time (more on that below).
Cons:
- TouchScreen
Yes I know, it’s both a Pro and a Con. As well as the touch screen works, like all bleeding edge technologies, it’s not perfect. So I will compare this to the best touch experience I have tried to date, yes the "iPhone". Very much like the iPhone, the HP’s display screen swipes and touch/selects. That said, I found the screen swipes not to be as responsive sometimes. There is also some lack of smoothness on the screen. It may just need a better glass treatment. Or quite simply, an inherent problem to swiping and touch on such a wide landscape. Finally, and this is probably a problem that touchscreen technology will face in general. The legacy applications, like older windows games bundled with the computer, were not accurately accepting the touch commands.
{mospagebreak title=Conclusions}
The overall initial feeling with this unit, was a pleasant experience. Out of the box it was easy to setup, with minimal connections. The mouse and keyboard designs flowed nicely with the main display unit. The stunning 25.5 inch touch screen display looks fantastic, and handles the touch features for the most part very well.There is a colored HP ambient light under the display that lets you set a mood, and better visibilty of the keyboard in the dark.
Included as well is a media remote for the embedded Microsoft Windows Media Center services. For around $2000.00, the HP Touchsmart IQ816 PC, provides plenty of storage and ram, as well as a rich multimedia touch environment, with a small footprint to boot. In my opinion, a good deal.
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