(Photo by special arrangement)

USER-FRIENDLY: The HP TouchSmart PC

Seoul (South Korea): In a radical shift in how personal computers are conceived and positioned, Hewlett Packard has given its latest PC the sense of touch — and reduced important operations to `fingering' the screen or clicking a `remote.'

At a stroke, the TouchSmart PC, unveiled here this week, has transformed a boring — and for many families, challenging — technology to something as easy as operating a television set, or jotting notes on a pad.

The new PC is built around a 19-inch Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) flat screen and doubles as a TV monitor, thanks to a built-in tuner.

Leveraging the multimedia features of the upcoming Windows `Vista' operating system, the TouchSmart lets the user touch various options displayed on screen — much as customers would at a bank ATM. They can also write short messages free-hand on the screen (or use a stylus) and save them like the `sticky' PostIt note pads that are so popular. In a home situation, one can also `speak' the note to family members, who can then play it back by another "point and touch" operation.

To facilitate its use in the common spaces of the house — say, the kitchen — the keyboard, which fits snugly under the monitor when not in use, has water-tight seals around the keys to make them coffee spill-proof.

To complete the all-in-one home PC approach, the machine allows users to slot an HP direct photo printer behind the monitor, so that the combo works as a single unit (using the PC's power supply).

Amir Karim, HP's U.S.-based Director, Home Products, explained that with this whole new approach to computing as a family fun thing, the company hoped to create a new product niche that would appeal to those who wanted the friendly feel of a home machine, with the productivity and safety features that Windows Vista promises. A DVD burner and a large hard disk (320 GB) with 2 GB of memory makes this one of the best endowed of entertainment platforms.

The TouchSmart PC will become available globally, including in India, in the second quarter of 2007 at a suggested price of U.S. $2,500.

The preview event also saw the extension of touch technology to an ultra-light entertainment notebook PC, the TX 1000, aimed cannily at the "Young and Restless" market. Both the notebook and the TouchSmart desktop PC are built with latest dual core chips from AMD — an interesting departure from a player who has, by and large, remained an `Intel Inside' vendor.

A number of other desktop and hand-held models, unveiled here over two days, by HP in its Compaq and iPaq range, showed evidence of bottom-up industrial re-design — an apparent effort to differentiate the company in an arena like PCs, where it has always been difficult to tell one player's offerings from another.

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