HP’s TouchSmart TM2
HP today expanded its award-winning portfolio of mobile products with a new TouchSmart notebook and colorful netbooks, including the company’s first touch-enabled Mini. Building on HP TouchSmart software innovation, the thin, powerful HP TouchSmart tm2 updates the tx2 – the industry’s first convertible notebook PC with multitouch technology designed specifically for consumers. With the convertible tm2, customers can choose the product configuration and input method that is most comfortable and natural, whether on a couch, in an airplane or while surfing the web.(3) As a traditional notebook, the tm2 offers a keyboard and touch-enabled display for input. Converted to a slate, the tm2 morphs into a sketchpad with digital pen, allowing artists to sketch on the go and students to take notes in class.
No hard feelings, tx2, but there was always something just a little “behind the curve” about your design and feature set, and we’re kind of glad HP decided to go all-new with its TouchSmart tm2 followup. The 12.1-inch laptop is powered by new Intel Core 2 Duo procs and even discrete ATI Mobility Radeon graphics if you’re man enough, and claims 9 hours of battery life off its standard 6-cell. Most importantly, the capacitive multitouch screen is finger and pen friendly. The physical design takes some cues from HP’s new Envy laptops, including the controversial unibutton touchpad and lovable aluminum build, and seems decently thinner, lighter and stronger than the tx2. The laptop should be out on January 17th with a starting price of $949.
Design
The TouchSmart tm2 certainly catches your eye with its aluminum lid and deck decorated with a wave-like, laser-engraved illustration. (HP calls it Riptide.) This treatment isn’t as in-your-face as what you’ll find on the Envy line, which we appreciate; it’s only on the right part of the lid and to the right of the large touchpad. The bright and glossy 12.1-inch display (1200 x 800 pixels) has a thick black bezel surrounding it, which houses two loud but tinny Altec Lansing speakers along the bottom. The chiclet-style keyboard and touchpad are also black. Weighing 4.4 pounds, the tm2t is considerably lighter than its chunky plastic predecessor, the 5-pound tx2z. That’s partially because this notebook omits an optical drive. The tm2t also has a thinner profile, tapering from 1 inch in the front to 1.5 inches in the back to accommodate the beefy battery. (The tx2z measured 1.2 inches at its thinnest point.) This slope on the bottom of the machine actually makes it easier to hold in tablet mode. The tm2’s sturdy hinge creates a bulge on the back, but it allows users to rotate the screen in either direction. Overall, this convertible feels solid, but we noticed that the touch display makes the system somewhat top heavy. If we tilted the display more than 20 degrees backward the whole notebook would start to topple while on a desk or in our lap.
Display
The tm2′s 12.1-inch, 1280 x 800-pixel resolution screen is quite crisp, but the main adjective that comes to mind when describing it is glossy. We know we mention the need for more matte displays almost weekly, but in this case we were really beside ourselves – it seriously could double as a mirror. Viewing angles of the screen are also less than stellar; when we flipped the screen around and tilted it back to about 45 degrees, colors just faded, and we simply couldn’t make out images. Speaking of flipping the screen around – the unit’s bi-directional 360-degree hinge feels solid, and matching grooves along the edge of the keyboard and lid keep it locked in place when converted into slate mode. While we do have those major issues with the gloss of the screen, the capacitive touchscreen layer was extremely responsive to finger and stylus input. Dragging a finger down the screen to scroll was very responsive, and light taps on icons / within menus was all it took to navigate Windows 7 Home Premium. Windows 7′s touchpack comes preloaded, and we had a ball zooming in on the earth in Surface Globe. While we do love the Garden Pond screen saver, which lets you put multiple fingers on virtual water, HP’s own DigiFish Dolphin application let us “swim” with the creatures and zoom in and out. Yes, if you’re like us, it will keep you amused for at least… oh, five minutes.
Keyboard & Touchpad
The pad was way too sensitive during our testing; just brushing up against it ever so slightly while typing caused the cursor to jump up a few lines. On other occasions the tm2t would select a few lines of text when we didn’t want it to and we would accidentally delete sentences or entire paragraphs. The TouchSmart tm2t sports a spacious layout, and we like that it has dedicated action keys above the numbers. You can do anything from adjust the brightness to turn Wi-Fi on and off quickly and easily. Although we like the soft touch finish on the keys, which prevents slippage, the keys felt a bit chintzy and hollow as we typed, especially toward the edges of the keyboard. We also don’t like how HP unnecessarily shrunk the up and down arrow keys, to which we had to adjust. Selecting text (when we intended to) and even clicking on web links also proved more of a challenge on this notebook than most others we’ve tested. That’s because the cursor would often move just as we were about to press down on the left touch button. There’s more: the overactive pinch to zoom gesture would sometimes enlarge or shrink a web page when we just wanted to move around.
Software
In addition to its TouchSmart software, the tm2 comes preloaded with HP’s usual programs. Just like we mentioned in the dm4 review, a lot of stuff should go straight to the Recycle Bin – including the preloaded eBay and Shutterfly shortcut on the desktop. However, the HP dock that’s mounted to the top of the desktop is a nice addition once you customize it with applications you’d actually use. HP’s QuickWeb is also there, but we’ve never really ended up hanging in the pre-boot OS much.
Performance and Graphics
While this system’s no speed demon, the 1.2-GHz Core i3-U330 processor and 3GB of RAM inside the tm2t combine to offer fairly snappy performance—when you’re not fighting the touchpad. While its PCMark Vantage score of 3,806 is below the category average (4,033), the notebook barely flinched when we had several tabs open in Google Chrome while streaming Hulu in HP’s TouchSmart software in a smaller window. Using its discrete graphics, the tm2t outclasses most other notebooks in its weight class; it turned in a 3DMark06 score of 2,882, considerably higher than the 2,127 average. The machine also notched very good frame rates in World of Warcraft, reaching 109 fps at 1024 x 768 and 35 fps at native resolution. The tm2t also managed 37 fps at the lower pixel count, though it dropped to an unplayable 17 fps at 1280 x 800.
