HP Shows Off New Line of Touchsmart PCs

Tweet

Wow, what a difference a weekend makes, huh? I just got done talking about what HP needed to do to become the “cool company” like Apple, and then along comes HP with a pair of new Touchsmart PCs. And rest assured, the HP Touchsmart 610 and the HP Touchsmart 9300 look pretty cool indeed.

What’s really changed about the new line of Touchsmarts is that, now, they recline. And this may not sound like much, but when you consider how tough it is to hold your arm straight out and touch things on a screen for longer than, say, ten minutes at a clip, you begin to appreciate a much more ergonomically viable concept like this.

But it’s not just fancy design that gives the HP Touchsmart a lot of viability in the market–it’s also the potency of its spec list. For instance, the powerful 9300 (clearly geared to the business crowd) is packing an i3, i5 or i7 processor, along with integrated Intel HD graphics (or discrete graphics, your call) as well as up to a one terabyte hard drive (or a 160 gig solid state drive), Windows 7 Professional, and a variety of HP specific applications like HP Power Assistant and a webcam that can be used as a biometric login device, meaning you now wear your password on your head. If you start now you may be able to talk your boss into buying these by the time they hit shelves this May, though since the prices are as yet undetermined, you might have a tough time with that.

And as I’ve said before, HP has to ensure that it’s worth coming home to as well to be the “cool company”, so they’re also getting ready to wheel out the HP Touchsmart 610, the home version. You’ll get all that great reclining action, as well as at least an Intel Core i3 processor, four gigs of RAM, a 750 gig hard drive, DVD burner, Intel HD integrated graphics, wi-fi, Bluetooth, and HP Beats audio software. You can also bump it up a notch to an i5 processor, six gigs of RAM, a terabyte hard drive and a Blu-ray combo drive. This one hits shelves this Wednesday, at last report, and will come your way for $899.99.

Cool enough? Cool as the other side of the pillow, as they say on Family Guy.