Comments on: HP introduces first multi-touch consumer Tablet PC: TouchSmart TX2

By: tlewis

tlewis — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:13:13 +0000

What’s the up-to-date situation re: n-trig in general and pressure sensitivity in PhotoShop, Painter…etc, in particular?

The use of n-trig in a consumer machine seems premature if the many aches and bumps I’m reading about with Dell’s tablet haven’t been smoothed. Especially given the sad hp tech support attested to in above posts.
t

By: Adam W

Adam W — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:30:14 +0000

Gordon, that is not always true. I have a dv4 “entertainment notebook” or whatever the heck HP calls it which has the intel centrino 2 chipset.

I would honestly be in mobile computing heaven if I could have my dv4 notebook with the convertible touch screen goodness of the tx2. I’m a college student and I love my laptop however I wish I could use it with my math class. A traditional notebook isn’t very good with math IMO since you can’t write out your problems, thus you have to fall back on that old technology some people call pen/pencil and paper.

By: Gordon Cahill

Gordon Cahill — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:49:09 +0000

Flying Shawn: HP have been copying and pasting that mistake for nearky two years. It’s a good way of fiding out whether a reviewer is just copying and pasting from the HP press release. The TX2xxx lasts around 4 hours on the 8 cell.

AdamW: Since this is a refresh of the TX line an intel proocessor meand new motherboard and probably chassis as well. Consumer = AMD, Business = Intel. And my TX2000 runs Photoshop just as fast as any equivalent intel box I’ve used.

Gordon

By: Adam W

Adam W — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:12:43 +0000

Hey James, would you please tell your contacts at HP that they need to re-release this notebook but with an INTEL processor in it? I love the new tx2 however I love my P8600 and nvidia 9200 even more.

I don’t understand why their tablets always run AMD chips. I’m sure they could push a few more units if they either switched to Intel only or offered the choice.

By: FlyingShawn

FlyingShawn — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:12:23 +0000

I was really excited about this as a possible replacement for when my trusty old Toshiba Tecra M4 dies, until I went to HP’s site and tried configuring one to see what the cost would end up being.

Then I stumbled across something rather disturbing: when I got to the page where you can select which size battery you want, I noted that under the “8 Cell” option it said “Up to 2 hours, 15 minutes of battery life” (with the fine print at the bottom specifying that the benmark was made with MobileMark 2007 and the wireless functionality off). Unless this is a miss-print by HP and that note belongs with the 4 cell battery (which isn’t even an option at the moment), that’s just pitiful for the largest battery option available! I could understand if that was a BatteryEater score, but I don’t think that MobileMark is a battery stress test (could be wrong on that).

By: Roger McIntosh

Roger McIntosh — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:58:14 +0000

It occurs to me that I should relay a few other observations after using the previous version of this notebook for the past 4 months.
1) I like the concept and feature set.
2) Build quality is extremely poor. The fingerprint reader is improperly mounted, the latch was broken out of the box, and one of the Ctrl keys requires extreme pressure to activate.
3) Worst keyboard on any notebook I have ever used.
4) Battery life is horrid.
5) HP service is poor. They sent the unit back without having fixed the problems I reported and reimaged the hard drive with the wrong OS (I purchased it with 64-bit Vista and it was returned with 32-bit Vista).

Summary — good concept and design, very poor execution and follow-through.

By: Roger McIntosh

Roger McIntosh — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:39:34 +0000

Looks like a VERY minor update to the existing tx2500, which was a VERY minor update to the tx2120. My tx2120 just came back from the HP service depot (after 2 weeks) still non-functional. HP seems to favor marketing hype over technical excellence.

By: James Kendrick

James Kendrick — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 09:36:02 +0000

This is the N-Trig digitizer. Here's the link: http://www.hp.com/united-states/campaigns/touchsmart/notebook/buy.html

By: Fernando

Fernando — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 09:32:27 +0000

Hmmm, for soem reason the pictures show up in Firefox but not in IE7 for me; oh well…

Is this also an N-Trig capacitive digitizer, or is it some other tech? Do you have the link for ordering?

Thanks.

By: James Kendrick

James Kendrick — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 09:25:15 +0000

The tx2000 has a resistive touch digitizer which works nothing like this capacitive digitizer. This is the first consumer notebook (only the second of any kind) that offers it.