HP Touchsmart tm2 tablet now official!
It’s here! The HP Touchsmart tm2 tablet PC! This notebook has a 12 inch multi-touch display, an all new design (versus the old Pavilion tx1000, tx2000 and tx2), is powered by a Intel Core 2 Duo processor and has ATI graphics. Here’s a list of the Touchsmart tm2′s main features:
- Intel Core 2 Duo low-voltage processor
- ATI graphics
- Full-sized chiclet keyboard “borrowed from the Pavilion dm3″
- 12 inch capacitive multi-touch screen (you can use either your fingers or the included stylus) with swivel function
- 3 USB ports, VGA connector, covered LAN port, headphone jack (no microphone port, probably shared with the headphone port), HDMI output
- Buttonless trackpad like on the Envy 13/15: it supports multi-touch but can also be set to conventional “single touch” mode
- New Touchsmart UI and Bump Top 3D desktop interfaces for interactive multi-touch
- New, slimmer and more solid design (new imprint patterns too!)
- External optical drive (there’s none built-in)
- 9 hour battery life
- Sub-$1000 starting price
In my opinion, the Touchsmart tm2 is a whole lot like a ‘tablet Envy’ with its new design and specifications. You can see a lot of HP Envy design elements on the bottom half of the notebook (keyboard, palmrest, buttonless trackpad, rounded edges and simple port layout) as well as in its features list (long battery life, multitouch trackpad support, an Intel low-voltage processor paired with ATI graphics) which make it sound much like the Envy 13. The upper-half looks like a mashup of the original Touchsmart tx2′s glossy display with the slimness of the Elitebook 2730p tablet’s display. And there are buttons on the edges of the screen too, to be used when the Touchsmart tm2 is in slate mode. Thankfully, the price of the Touchsmart tm2 is more reasonable than the HP Envy series, with a sub-$1000 starting price tag. If you asked me, all of a sudden, the Touchsmart tm2 is starting to look real tasty… it’s almost the perfect ultra-portable notebook/tablet, save for the glossy display.
