HP TouchSmart TM2-101ea review

Tablet laptops have never really caught on in the PC world for general use, as the operating system support for touchscreens has been so poor and the computers relatively expensive. HP’s hoping this will change with its TouchSmart TM2-101ea laptop, which is the first we’ve seen to run Windows 7 with its native multi-touch support.

The TouchSmart TM2 is a convertible tablet: it looks like a conventional laptop, but the screen can we swivelled 180 degrees and folded back across the keyboard, so that it can be used handheld in portrait mode. It’s multitouch (two points of contact), so works with Windows 7’s touch features, including pinch-to-zoom.

Sadly, the computer has no accelerometer, so you have to press the rotate button fixed into the side of the screen if you want to switch from landscape to portrait modes. In portrait mode the computer’s easier to hold in your arms, although at 2.2kg it can start to feel a bit heavy after a while.

Portrait mode also has a couple of other problems. First, the vertical viewing angles (horizontal viewing angles in portrait mode) on the 12.1in, 1,280×800 screen aren’t very good. When you’re holding the tablet, moving your head slightly to either side quickly makes the image disappear. The problem is exacerbated by the glossy coating on the screen, which picks up reflections easily. In landscape mode, it’s not such a problem, as you can tilt the screen easily; in portrait mode it’s more annoying, as the natural way to hold the tablet tends to mean the screen’s pointing at overhead lighting, such as office lights. It’s a shame, as the quality of the screen is actually very good. In our tests we found that contrast was excellent, colours are vibrant and whites were nice and bright.

Secondly, HP bundles its TouchSmart software, which has a range of applications that you can use with touch alone, such as an image editor and organiser. Unfortunately, HP hasn’t written this suite to work in Portrait mode and it crashes out with a warning message if you try. The only application that really takes advantage of the TouchSmart in portrait mode is Windows Journal (a staple of tablet PCs since Windows XP Tablet PC Edition), which takes handwritten notes and drawings using the supplied pen, which slots into the base of the laptop.

In standard laptop mode things aren’t a lot better. For starters, the laptop is top heavy, so trying to use the touchscreen while it’s sitting on a desk has the effect that it makes the computer wobble disconcertingly. This makes Windows 7’s touch features annoying to use.

Switching to the touchpad’s not much better. For this model HP has decided to make the buttons part of the pad. While this may work wonders for design, it makes the TouchSmart incredibly annoying to use. We found that wresting our thumb on the left button, as we would on a normal laptop, just made the cursor jump randomly around the screen. It’s a shame that control is so difficult for a laptop that’s designed to be incredibly simple to use.

Otherwise, the laptop’s pretty good and we’re big fans of the keyboard. The keys are all a decent size. We found them comfortable and responsive to use and they’re incredibly quiet. Touch typists will find this keyboard very nice to use.

Performance from the 4GB of RAM and dual-core 1.3GHz Intel Pentium U4100 processor were pretty good, with an overall score of 45 in our benchmarks. This means that this computer’s more than fine for day-to-day tasks and light image editing, but you’ll want something more powerful for video editing.

It’s nice to find a dedicated graphics card inside. The ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4550 managed 16fps in our Call of Duty 4 test, although we got playable frame rates by dropping the resolution and detail settings. In other words, you can manage some light gaming on this computer.

Switching to battery automatically switches the laptop to use the onboard Intel graphics chipset (a utility lets you switch manually, too). This is a lot less powerful, but uses less power and helps battery life. Here, we’ve got nothing to complain about with the TouchSmart lasting an incredible 9h 43m in our light-use test.

This isn’t enough to make up for the rest of the package. Ultimately, the TouchSmart is a little too heavy and the screen too hard to see for portrait mode, while the annoying touchpad makes it frustrating to use as a normal laptop. Add in the relatively high price of £800 for the specification and it quickly adds up that this isn’t a laptop that’s worth bothering with. We’d forgo having a touchscreen in favour of the cheaper Acer Timeline AS1810TZ-413G25N.