Unboxing ceremony: my new HP TouchSmart
After years and years of waiting and working on others’ laptops I decided to get my own! It is funny that I bought my previous laptop a whopping 8 years ago when I started graduate school at Stony Brook (I also own a netbook but that is used exclusively when I am on the road).
This is why I decided to get one of the best models available at the moment. I got a 12-inch tablet HP TouchSmart tm2. It has Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300, 4 GB of RAM, 320 GB hard drive, and a Windows 7 with multitouch support.
In fact, it is multiple gadgets in one box: it is possible to use it as follows:
- an e-book reader because it supports landscape/portrait orientations
- watching movies is also quite convenient
- it is a nice development machine with its dual-core CPU and 4GB of RAM.
One of the features that I like the most is hand-writing recognition – it is so accurate nowadays. I only had to go through a small training session in which the computer asked me to write down a number of sentences in my own style. Multitouch gestures is another cool feature which is supported for example in a few games that Microsoft has developed.
I have also installed BumpTop – a state of the art 3D desktop. The only problem with it is that it does not support native input methods, this means that I always had to use keyboard for typing.
While looking for a suitable model at Verkokauppa I have noticed that it offers lots of bigger laptops with screen sizes as much as 17 inch. Of course one can say that 12 inch of TouchSmart is not enough. But this is not the case when size matters. The screen has exceptional brightness which makes it possible and even convenient to use small font sizes. On the other hand, monstrous laptops have so much unused space in the keyboard area. It looks as if I am buying not a laptop but a pad for the coffee cup.
To summarize, TouchSmart is a compact and lightweight (2.1 kg) yet extremely capable device! The only problem that I have experienced so far is learning which touch gesture is doing what – there are so many possible gestures on a multitouch screen! But the time spent learning multitouch is not wasted as this is the technology of the future, undoubtedly.
Obligatory unboxing ceremony images:
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June 29th, 2010 at 8:20 am
[...] there was a chance to buy an Apple gadget. I have been spending money on various things such as a laptop with a touchscreen similar to iPad but it works as a normal laptop as well (btw. I am VERY happy with it after 2 month [...]