As Hewlett-Packard is more than happy to point out, the company has long been a pioneer in the world of touch-based computing. It released its first touch-screen PC, the HP-150, way (way) back in 1983. Its current TouchSmart line of all-in-one (AIO) desktops, however, made its first appearance in early 2007 with the IQ770.
Since then, HP has vastly improved its hardware design, making subsequent TouchSmart machines slimmer and sleeker, while staying well ahead of the competition on the touch-software front, offering substantive touch-centric apps like Rhapsody, Recipe Box, and Hulu. Competing touch-PC makers have thus far largely stuck to including a couple of finger-friendly flash games, and generic image-editing and note-taking apps.
But while we think HP still leads the way as far as the overall touch experience goes, several competing all-in-one desktops are now available with touch screens. And software aside, HP’s 20-inch-screened TouchSmart 310z, priced at $1,049 direct in our test configuration, is far outclassed by Gateway’s excellent ZX6951-53, an under-$1,000 AIO that sports a larger 23-inch (1080p) screen, a TV tuner, a Blu-ray drive, and a faster processor that yields better overall system performance. So while we like HP’s TouchSmart software, it’s hard to recommend this machine over the Gateway unless you’ve spent some serious time playing with a TouchSmart in-store and have concluded you can’t live without its touch apps.
Design and Features
Like we said up top, HP has come a long way since the bulky days of the early TouchSmart machines. Much like its larger sibling, the TouchSmart 600, the TouchSmart 310z is housed in a sleek, relatively slim enclosure with rounded edges both on the front and back. The front is, of course, dominated by the 20-inch, 1,600×900-resolution screen, above which sits a 1.3-megapixel Webcam. Below the screen, you’ll find the speakers, which, while certainly not on par with a set of high-end external speakers, do a decent job filling a room with music or movie dialogue.
On the right side of the TouchSmart 310z lives the power button and a tray-loading DVD drive. (Sadly, it’s not a Blu-ray drive, but then, the screen isn’t quite up to 1080p playback, anyway.) Below the drive, near the bottom of the screen, are headphone and mic jacks, and a multi-format flash-card slot. The left side of the PC sports just a pair of USB 2.0 ports.
Around back are four more USB ports, a power jack for the external power supply, a Gigabit Ethernet jack, a single analog audio-out jack, a port for an external Wi-Fi antenna, and a coaxial connector for the TV tuner. (802.11n Wi-Fi connectivity is also included.)
On the peripheral front, HP thankfully includes a wireless keyboard and mouse. Much like the system’s design, they’re solid and serviceable, but not really snazzy. Dedicated volume and mute buttons are the keyboard’s key features, while the mouse is a plain glossy black affair. In a nice design touch, they both use one unified USB transceiver, so you’ll only lose one port when plugging them in.
Touch Software
The freshest part of the 310z is the system’s updated TouchSmart 4.0 software. Previous versions relied on a carousel-like interface that had you scrolling back and forth between running apps at near-full-screen, which often became tedious when you were trying to multitask. This time around, HP has implemented a sort of live desktop background on which you can drop running apps (such as Facebook or Twitter) so you can get back to them with a single tap, as well as photos, notes, music, or videos.
HP calls these items “magnets,” and the analogy is apt since the items you drop on the background are easy to see and interact with (by tapping). But as anyone who has placed magnets and photos on a refrigerator knows, before long, things tend to get disorganized and messy. Thankfully, the software allows for more than one desktop screen, so if and when things get crowded and cluttered, you can swipe to the left or right for more space to place magnets.
Also new with this iteration of the TouchSmart software is the addition of an app store. We think this is an important step in the right direction for making touch computing appealing, since the limited pre-installed touch apps, while better than the competition’s, will become stale over time. Unfortunately, as of this writing (in early March 2011), we noted only 12 available apps, most of which were free time-wasters, such as a bubble-wrap-popping game and kid-centric Cartoon Network titles. A Marvel Comics app holds some promise, though you’ll have to pay for most of that content, of course, and we can’t say a horizontally oriented screen tethered to a desk sounds like the best way of keeping up with Peter Parker or the X-Men.
HP has definitely improved its TouchSmart software with the move to 4.0, but only time will tell whether its most important feature, the app store, fleshes out into something exciting or fizzles into the future with just a handful of ho-hum offerings. We’d really like to see HP integrate WebOS, the touch-based phone and tablet OS the company picked up as part of its purchase of Palm, into the TouchSmart mix. Some slick WebOS apps scaled up on on a large monitor, mixed with the tilt-down screen on HP latest TouchSmart, the TouchSmart 610, could lead to a truly innovative desktop touch experience.
Specs & Performance
Our test system came equipped with a 2.5GHz quad-core AMD Athlon II 615e processor, 6GB of RAM, a 1TB hard drive, and a TV tuner. While the spacious hard drive and the TV tuner are welcome options for a media-centric PC, the quad-core CPU is a bit of an odd choice here. Most non-professional or software isn’t yet written to take full advantage of multiple cores, so unless you often run three or four CPU-taxing tasks at once, you’re better off with a faster-clocked dual-core CPU. On the upside, if you’re ordering your TouchSmart 310z directly from HP, you can opt for a 3GHz dual-core Athlon CPU and shave $80 off the system’s asking price. We’d suggest doing so, because while the system was generally snappy in our anecdotal testing in standard Windows programs, when launching apps and navigating around the TouchSmart interface, we did notice some visual choppiness and overall sluggishness.
Looking at the performance numbers from our labs testing, it’s clear that, while the TouchSmart 310z is a capable machine for media-centric tasks, and a suitably powerful family PC, it’s a bit behind the pack versus other similarly priced all-in-ones. In our CPU-centric Cinebench 10 test, which taxes all available CPU cores, the TouchSmart 310z managed a respectable score of 7,780, but the Gateway ZX6951, with its 3.2GHz Intel Core i3-550 CPU, held a clear lead with a score of 10,031.
That trend continued on our real-world media-file-manipulation tests. The TouchSmart 310z took 3 minutes and 57 seconds to transcode our standard video test file in our Windows Media Encoder test; the Gateway slid in well ahead, taking just 3:15 for the same task. The disparity was even more pronounced in our iTunes Conversion Test. It took just 2 minutes and 39 seconds for the Gateway to convert our 11 test tracks from MP3 to AAC, while the HP lagged well behind, taking 4:15. In PCMark Vantage, a synthetic test suite designed to measure overall system performance, the Gateway machine cemented its lead with a score of 7,012 to the TouchSmart’s 4,134.
Neither machine is suitable for gaming beyond casual titles, thanks to their integrated graphics. The Radeon HD 4270 chip found on the TouchSmart managed under 3 frames per second (fps) in the least-demanding iteration of our Far Cry 2 DirectX 9 gaming test at the screen’s native 1,600×900 resolution. Dialing down the graphics settings and resolution will give you better results (and you should be able to play casual games at low resolutions on this machine). But if you’re really looking for an all-in-one with some gaming chops, the Lenovo IdeaCentre B305 is a better choice, thanks to its dedicated Nvidia graphics chip.
Conclusion
It’s hard to argue with the facts: Gateway’s similarly priced ZX6951-53 offered up decidedly better scores across the board in our lab tests, and it sports a larger screen and a Blu-ray drive, even if it does have a third less RAM and a smaller hard drive than the TouchSmart 310z. That being said, the TouchSmart is plenty fast enough for everyday computing tasks. But you’re definitely paying extra in terms of the performance-for-price ratio for the TouchSmart and its finger-friendly apps.
As a result, we strongly suggest spending a fair amount of time playing with a TouchSmart machine in a store before buying to see if the apps are really worth the added cost to you. The Gateway’s touch software is far less compelling, to our eyes. But unless HP’s TouchSmart app store gains some traction and adds some apps to keep users coming back, we still think the touch screen will end up a seldom-used feature after the novelty wears off. Unless you’re certain the TouchSmart’s pre-installed touch software is a feature you can’t live without, think twice: Most users will be better served by the larger, higher-resolution screen, Blu-ray drive, and added performance offered by Gateway’s ZX6951-53.
Source:http://computershopper.com/desktops/reviews/hp-touchsmart-310z
