This is short summary and review for the newly release HP Touch Smart IQ500 has launched in Singapore. I was invited by Melvin Yuan to take a look at their releasing product in this coming July in Asia last Tuesday.
After talking with the HP product manager Daniel for TouchSmart IQ500 in Singapore, and tried first hand on the set. I’ve discovered that there are 10 things you might not be aware of HP TouchSmart through merely looking at the Ads or some online review, here they are:
No Apple-like multi-touch yet, which means no pinch to zoom nor three fingers to go back, but the multi-touch screen is designed to be object-sensitive rather than pressure-sensitive, so you can actually use your fountain pen to write on the screen.
The native screen resolution is 1680 * 1050, which means you can view HD1080p with large amount of pleasure due to its clarity because of many pixels are present, but you can’t take the advantage of the full resolution of 1080p because it still lacks quite a number of pixels according to that.
The keyboard and mouse came with the computer are both wireless. To me they feel just alright comparing with those magnificent ones on my MacBook Pro and my Logitech DeNovo Edge. And the wireless duo doesn’t come with a dock + charging station like that of DeNovo Edge - Yes, you need to replace the battery.
Don’t eat KFC and play with the screen at the same time! the screen is not oil-proof, though it could resist a certain amount of normal grease on your fingertips.
The PC comes with a remote control, which is designed for Windows Media Center rather than the HP TouchSmart Center, which is the piece of software HP developed for this TouchSmart PC.
TouchSmart Center can’t do TV, nor could it easily help you to transfer photos from your memory card to computer just yet. And yeah, you can’t delete the photos or videos through the interface either, which might be a good thing for people who like to press the X button all the time.
The plainly washed white and bright ambient light makes me want to buy a nice lava lamp and put beside the PC to create some nice ambience instead
They are many pieces of pre-installed software on the PC. Many are quite useful, unlike that of Sony. But for that many games installed, you have only 4 free credits to play, so pay more to play them all.
HP software does not use the native resolution, which causes screen to flick and computer to hang for a period when switching out of the TouchSmart center program using Alt+Tab
Vista still hangs now and then, and many applications take a while to start.
And here are the ten things you might know about:
HP produces some of the best Ads in the market today, including a nicely composed tune
The product looks really nice from afar, a giant photo frame sitting there.
You can use your stylus to write on the screen and play ink ball with your thumbdrive
Playing Solitaire and BeJeweled with fingers are really neat with friends together, a multi-user hot-seat scenario.
Coverflow on the machines is nicer than that of Apple, there is more context visible when spreading like a fan instead of vertically stacked.
You can watch TV on your desktop without bothering to buy TV cards and install them
They have wooping 4G RAM pre-installed to use on the system
It runs a 64-bit Windows Vista!
Telling Mom how to use the computer has never been easier, MA, just use you hand to press that red button!
It has built-in audio and video recording capability, you can do audio notes and voice memo easily.
Check it out for yourself when this coming July, you just find the perfect PC to sit in your living room.
PS: I think Apple’s iMac 24 inch’s look is cool comparing with this as well, but it lacks the Touch function and many more. And there are manyreviewsoutthere, if you will, take a look at them as well. But you really gota touch this HP TouchSmart IQ500 first to experience for yourself.
If Last.FM is the music meta browser, then Toluu is the RSS feed meta browser.
On the profile page, it displays all the RSS feeds you are subscribing to currently (I imported all my RSS feeds through Google Reader’s OPML export function), all the contacts of yours and some really great feeds(regardless if you have subscribed to them or not)
On clicking on each single feed, you can see recent posts in the feed, what popular posts are, as well as how many people have subscribed to this feed in Toluu.
One more thing about Toluu is that when clicking on one of your contact, you are able to see how many feeds do you have in common, which is kind of fun if both of us are feed junkies.
If you want an invite as well, send me a direct message d dusenyao on Twitter with your email address and name.
Windows Search 4.0 has just released to the public, here are some of my first impressions. When downloading the software from Microsoft Website from the new Opera 9.5 , it shows it requires Silverlight to download the piece of software, so I have to switch to IE based software Maxthon to download the .exe file.
It takes a while to install the application. After which it displays a search bar at the bottom of the screen, as well as a button in the tray to pause indexing etc.
And clicking in the text field will pop up a menu like this, unlike the big fat Google Desktop search bar which displays a huge truck in the middle of the screen.
Previous version of the Windows Desktop Search didn’t do too much good as it slows down my computer too much sporadically, which is annoying.
The newer version of Windows Desktop Search works with Office 2007, as the component indexing for Outlook and OneNote. The experience so far as I am using it is that I feel the searching speed is fast, comparable with that of Spotlight on my Leopard.
I am going to keep it around for a while until it slows down my computer again.
Because I am caught in between all the social websites, I am trying to have a life as well. I think the following video does speak some of our geeks’ heart out, well, only occasionally.
Since Estee and I started our own show with Michael Cheng and Bernard Leong, I am constantly thinking how to improve, and when I stumble upon this video interview of Leo Laporte, I am really inspired.
Guy Kawasaki, who is going to Malaysia to give a talk soon, has a good idea on this, but I am not talking about him. He’s Gary Vaynerchuk, interviewed on CNBC on his ideas how he has realized his dream, and how they helped other people.
Here is a short video podcast we did for about two weeks, our pilot episode of the Geek Goddess show. It is created by Bernard Leong and Michael Cheng. Though it has been a tough time filming and editing it, I thoroughly enjoy working both of them on the show.
Take a look at the first episode and you’ll understand the title. From the next episode onwards, we hope to have more news for you and concentrate more on the Asian region.
I was browsing Facebook today and stumble upon a fairly interesting website: MagMyPic. It does one very simple thing for you: using your stylish photo on your computer, it creates a magazine cover for you to show off to your friends. So here is my take:
Well, I love the effect I create from the photo uploaded, but the function of zooming and panning is missing. Moving your photo around until you are satisfied is not that easy to do with the web interface yet. Not talking about customizing the fonts, the wordings as well the removing the watermark at the bottom of the photo.
Yet, I bet you could have loads fun with this as well.
My MacBook Pro + Nokia E61i phone for a while, and some of them I find particularly useful:
Home Zone : If you have used “Proximity” before, this is an advanced, more polished version. It creates different zones using wireless base stations, bluetooth device as well as ethernet addresses. Any changes to these three components will cause the application to perform some actions, like running an AppleScript, a shell script, or even a C program. I use this piece of software to lock&unlock my computer in conjunction with BluePhoneElite.
BluePhoneElite : First of all, this is still a piece of buggy software. Sometimes it crashes internally and quit running, sometimes it could not recover when the bluetooth connection to my phone is disrupted, and sometimes the single one of the important features of the software: the talk-through function is not functioning. That feature allows me to the handsfree profile from the phone and let it connect to my computer as the transceiver in the car. I was only able to manage to get it running now by first disabling all the services in the phone and then enabling them. But still, when my phone reboots, it is frustrating, I have to run through all the sequences again. Nevertheless, I love to use it more and more everyday to process my SMS and calls in the office without even pulling my phone out from my pocket.
OmniFocus & OmniOutliner: These are the two essential tools for me to manage my projects. They help me clear my thinking and arrange my work in order. OmniFocus has implemented the GTD concept, where I can file different actions I have thought of into an inbox and categorize them accordingly to different projects I have in hand. And I use OmniOutliner to sort out my thinking related to one problem in the project, listing all the aspects and the corresponding actions to those aspects, with all kinds of sub-points to support main argument
Afloat : I totally love this application, it is a very concise application that manages most of the window effects in my MacOSX. I do a lot of programming job, and I would love to see my console floating on top of the all the things I run at the background, perhaps with a little transparency to see what is going on at the background.
