The Touchsmart PCs have always tried to epitomize that future but the 1st gen machines weren’t exactly winners. We took the 2nd gen machines for a test drive and spoke to Randall Martin – HP’s Worldwide Director of Design for Commercial and Consumer Desktop PCs about the present and future of the Touchsmart PC line.

The meat and potatoes of the Touchsmart PC is the Touchsmart UI which overlays Windows Vista. Apps are neatly arranged in two rows; the often used ones are larger tiles on top with secondary apps below. You can rearrange them however you like. Most of the apps are right at home with your finger. Photos, videos, and music are all intuitively controlled by taps, swipes and flicks. It’s apps that require keyboard input that visibly break the whole Minority Report-esque experience. Some apps take you out of the Touchsmart UI into Windows but intelligently return when you close out of them. Good thing otherwise that quirk would be a totally annoyance.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 10:16 am and is filed under Technology Design. Tags: 500 GB SATA hard drive HP Touchsmart PC, Director of Design, HP Touchsmart PC, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.16 GHz processor HP Touchsmart PC, Microsoft Windows, Minority Report-esque experience, Randall Martin, Randall Martin - HP, Touchscreen interfaces Technology, Touchsmart PC, Touchsmart PC by Hewlett Packard, Touchsmart PC line, Touchsmart UI, Windows Vista, Worldwide Director. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.