HP TouchSmart IQ770 Review

That said, it's a pleasure to watch TV shows, slide shows, or home videos on the IQ770. The high-gloss, 19-inch widescreen display proved bright and vivid, with no bad pixels to be seen on our test unit, and the stereo speakers on either side of the display produce serviceable sound even with the volume cranked up to headache levels. You're into video messaging or online chat? A 1.3-megapixel Webcam is integrated into the top of the display.

Up/down channel and up/down/mute volume controls are conveniently placed on the right side of the screen bezel, with audio controls also at the left side of the keyboard. You'll find CD/DVD play/pause, next/previous track or chapter, stop, and eject buttons up front beneath the optical drive.

All of these controls, naturally, are duplicated on HP's infrared remote control, the sensor for which is happily built into the TouchSmart's front instead of relegated to a one-more-cord-to-untangle USB receiver as with most Media Center PCs to date.

The front panel also holds a headphone jack and two flash-card slots -- one for CompactFlash and MicroDrive media, the other for smaller xD, Memory Stick/Pro, MultiMediaCard, and SecureDigital memory cards. Behind a door labeled "Connectivity Center" are left and right audio-in jacks and S-Video, FireWire, and two USB 2.0 ports.

Another 1394 and three more USB ports are at the rear, along with a combined USB/power port for connecting the photo-printer cable; S/PDIF digital audio out and three 5.1 audio out (center/subwoofer, left/rear front, and left/rear surround) ports; a small connector for a supplied VGA adapter to connect an additional monitor; and infrared and Gigabit Ethernet ports. The last is bolstered by built-in 802.11a/b/g WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity.

On the system's left side, you'll find the FM, NTSC cable/antenna, and ATSC/HDTV inputs mentioned earlier, as well as S-Video and left and right audio inputs. The recess that holds these connectors is too narrow for your fingers to screw a conventional coax cable into place, though HP apologizes for that by providing two cables with push-on, right-angle connectors.

The TouchSmart's wireless keyboard tucks neatly into place beneath the front panel when not in use, though there's no hiding place for the wireless optical mouse. The mouse takes two AA batteries; the keyboard, four AAA cells.

The keyboard is wonderfully lightweight and has a good typing feel, but we weren't wild about its layout: Unless you turn off Num Lock to use the numeric keypad as a cursor-arrow compass like in the early PC days, the Insert, Delete, Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys are half-sized buttons all in a single row at the top right, so it's easy to hit one when you wanted another.

Kids, Do Leave Fingerprints on the Screen

Of course the TouchSmart's big feature -- or gimmick, depending on how you look at it -- is the polar opposite of wielding the remote control from across the room: it's a screen that responds to your touch. (Technically, the system responds to objects a millimeter or two away from touching the LCD; instead of a Tablet PC-style active digitizer with special stylus, it reacts to the supplied plain plastic stylus, a finger, a pencil, or what have you. And yes, HP says it's OK to clean with a cloth or paper towel and Windex or another glass cleaner.)

You can tap once to select menu items or move the cursor, or twice on a Windows icon to launch a program -- or just once, since one of the HP's setup options lets you switch from traditional mouse operations to a layout optimized for touch input, with a single tap doing the work of a double-click. Keeping your finger pressed against the display for a moment is the equivalent of a right-click.

The touch input works fine for navigating Media Center (and of course Solitaire), but isn't much use in the small confines of everyday applications -- hitting links in a Web page, for example, is awkward unless you enlarge text to screen-filling size.

Instead, the TouchSmart's bid for a place in your kitchen involves a trio of special HP programs. One, Photosmart Touch, is a drugstore-kiosk-style utility for importing images from a digital camera or memory card, seeing them as small or large thumbnails, and performing simple cropping, rotation, and red-eye-fix edits before selecting images for printing.

More original is HP SmartCenter, which puts turn-on-TV and -music icons alongside a digital clock and current-temperature/today's-local-forecast panels, as well as icons for HP's extensive help menus and a few other programs and Web pages of your choice. There's a dedicated button on the screen bezel to launch SmartCenter, though it's captioned by and the PC is decorated with other stickers in that creepy Addams Family font HP uses for its "The Computer Is Personal Again" ad campaign.

A Friend of the Family

Perhaps most impressive is SmartCalendar, which lets you type or scribble messages or reminders that appear as bulletin-board- or refrigerator-style sticky notes, with the added option of recording a brief (two minutes max) voice message. You can also glance at a four-week calendar or tap to see a full-screen calendar with daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly views, to which you can attach single or recurring appointments or events with date, time, and description fields.

Mouse-centric bundled software includes Roxio's CD/DVD Creator Basic and a trial version of Norton Internet Security, as well as the Yahoo Toolbar for Internet Explorer and plenty of eBay, online-service, and photo-printing offers. We missed seeing a DVD player, but there are Windows Media Player and Media Center to make do.

Obviously, you can buy a well-equipped PC and decent 19-inch flat-panel monitor for less than the HP's $1,800, even if you're looking for a Media Center PC/TV combo. But we find ourselves growing fond of the TouchSmart, even if we don't use the touch screen constantly.

If not as starkly elegant as an iMac, it's still an eye-catching as well as space-saving design. And though HP's first crack at a touch screen is a bit, sorry, can't resist, touchy -- we suspect a finer, more sensitive Tablet PC digitizer and stylus would permit neater, more practical handwritten instead of typed notes -- the idea of a TV/Web surfer/e-mail checker/family bulletin board is kind of appealing. The next generation of this product is going to be terrific.

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