HP’s refreshing the touch interface on its all-in-one PCs. The Touchsmart 600 and the newly minted Toucsmart 310 appear to have a heavily customized version of Thinix running on top of Windows 7. The Touchsmart’s UI is much more fluid and touch applications are no longer required to run in full screen, offering a little breathing room.
The TouchSmart Apps Center allows users to purchase touch-enabled apps from Marvel, the Cartoon Network and other partners. There are a handful of touch-enabled games as well. The “Magic Canvas” allows users to freely drag applications, files and web content around the display.
The HP TouchSmart tm2 will also get an update with TouchSmart Mobile 2.0 software in the coming weeks.
The new revision of the software looks like a big improvement compared to what’s on my TouchSmart 600xt, which my wife and I use as our bedroom PC. The fullscreen applications are a bit unwieldily on the 23″ display.
Any idea if this software will be available for earlier Touchsmart PCs, such as your 600xt, or my IQ500t?
I think the real question is: Will the menus be snappier? Demoing the previous machine to customers I’ve always found a major problem to be the fact that tiles moved with a massive delay (presumably due to an badly optimized menu that overloaded the weak GPU).