HP TouchSmart IQ770 PC

Marvelous!

You have everything you need to make a super in-car PC there! Touch screen, laptop components etc. all you have to do is lose the hideous thing holding the screen up and mount the screen somewhere remote to the case.

Dual touch??

Now if this had the same dual touch technology that the i-phone has then it might be worth the pitfalls.

The screen is at a bad angle for handwriting.

I think it would be better value for money to by a Tivo.

Screen angle

Tim

In the review I mentioned the screen mount but didn't spell out the fact that it's a pivoted joint so you can have the screen at almost any viewing or writing angle that you fancy.

I didn't much like the IQ770 but the angle of the screen is absolutely fine.

Leo

I played a bit with this one

I was at a MicroCenter in the US and played with one of these. I'm 55. I thought it was great for several reasons.

1. It was the first PC that was a stunning to look at as a iMac.

2. The touch screen was great, and very responsive

I don't think that I would ever need to move it around the house, so I don't think that your downgrading of the weight is a valid point. Do you carry your TVs around the house? If it's a TV or media center, it stays where you put it, doesn't it? You don't say, today you are a desktop and take it to the office! And if the screen is glass that could be contributing to the weight. Though, I'm glad the the screen support is 'battleship' like, but as someone with several movable mounts for LCDs on desktops, again, once it's set up, you don't really move it around a lot.

It's a shame about the performance ratings, it would be nice if it was higher, and perhaps they could have made it quieter and lighter if the power supply was a brick.

Weighty matters

I reckon it's deliberate that the IQ770 weighs so much as it avoids any hint of screen shake if you're prodding at the touch screen. I can see that in some homes where you might have three or four IQ770s scattered here and there that the weight might be an irrelevance. If you don't intend to move it around then I am sure you could select a machine that is better suited to a specific purpose and which costs less.

My view is that the IQ770 is multipurpose and therefore can fulfil a number of functions in a number of locations.

Kids got their friends round? park it in their room so they can watch a movie

Cooking? put it in the kitchen to look up recipes

Email? On the coffee table

My problem is that the IQ770 is effectively a laptop with a 19 inch touch screen but it doesn't have the portable nature of a laptop.

Can HP please

...go back to rebadging iPods? It looks... *hideous*, and unless you wanted to go for the printer thing, it wastes a lot of space too. The total absence of elegance of any kind is nothing short of stunning, it's like a car accident. Even if this was the 80s this thing would be considered an ugly bloated abomination that you'd be ashamed to have in your house unless you felt a dire and urgent need to convince every visitor of your total utter straightness by displaying absolute absence of taste.

Nevertheless, the idea itself is swell. An undersized (screenwise), underpowered machine like this would make for a very nice digital pictureframe, plus it could be a touch-controlled-mediacenter-dumb-terminal of some sort, as long as you don't want to watch a movie on it. Too pricy for that though. So maybe HP can make it look more like an iMac - heck, an iMac G4 even - reduce the power even more, and sell it at half the price.

Bet it won't play Hunt the Wumpus...

Looks nice, but as has been mentioned its a bit pricy and sadly, it runs a legacy operating system.

Now if it came with Linux, Beryl/Compiz and MythTV, it might be worth the price tag...