HP Touchsmart IQ770

Launch price £1,300.00

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Stuff says

Its limited touchscreen won’t revolutionise home computing, but the Touchsmart is a bona fide iMac alternative and the most family-friendly PC around

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It’s been a long road to mainstream acceptance for the touchscreen. HP built one into a desktop PC called as far back as 1983, but since then it’s had to settle for a niche role on PDAs and tablet PCs.

Like the Rasputin of tech, though, it’s returned in the guise of the Touchsmart. This HP is powered by Vista and is the first all-in-one you can navigate with your pinky. But is it an iMac-botherer?

Not quite the icon
First impressions suggest not. Unlike Apple’s iconic desktop and Sony’s minimalist LA2, the Touchsmart doesn’t build its brains into the screen, but keeps them stored in a fairly hefty base unit.

The brains themselves are also a mixed bag: there’s a generous 320GB of storage, but the laptop-esque AMD processor and nVidia graphics card won’t impress hardcore gamers. There’s also no HD-DVD drive.

Still, it’s perfectly capable of handling some fairly intensive Vista multi-tasking, and easily has enough power for its family audience. We’d also be perfectly happy to see its glossy black styling in our lounge.

Get into the kitchen
But that’s not where the Touchsmart feels most at home – HP is instead billing it as a kitchen PC for the family. The idea is that most of the time you’ll stash the keyboard and mouse under the screen, and use the touchscreen to leave messages, show off photos and check the weather before you go to work, without having to boot up and go into Vista.