Touchsmart600
Latest
HP stuffs Core i3 / i5 into TouchSmart PCs, gently revamps other desktops
Down for a solid spate of updates? Wipe that sleep from your eye and listen up, then. HP's pushing out a list of updates tonight across a rather strange combination of desktops, so we won't waste any time breaking it down. The standouts of the bunch are the revamped TouchSmart PCs, with both the TouchSmart 300 and 600 getting a dose of Core i3 / i5, some sort of "Beats Audio" inclusion and a suite of software that you may or may not wish to keep loaded on. Starting tags on these are listed at $799 and $1,099, respectively. Moving on, there's the All-in-One 200-5020, a $699 (and up) machine with a 21.5-inch 1080p display, Windows 7, built-in WiFi, an optional keyboard / mouse, DVD burner, integrated webcam and MediaSmart software bundle. For the suits in attendance, there's the HP Compaq 6005 Pro Ultra Slim, which measures 10-inches high and 2.6-inches wide, includes ATI's Radeon 4200 GPU and sports a $599 starting point. The whole lot should be available by the month's end if you find something you like. %Gallery-91290%
HP TouchSmart 600 Quad series does the Core i7 thing
What? Did Intel release a new processor or something? HP is just the latest PC vendor to make the Core i7 jump as it plans to put its new TouchSmart 600 Quad series up for sale starting today. The beefed up 23-inch all-in-one starts at $1,699 with options for a 1.6GHz Core i7 720QM or 1.73GHz Core i7 820QM Intel quad-core processor. Otherwise, the rest of the specs remain unchanged for this Windows 7 AIO. Still, if you've been waiting to pull the trigger since hearing about this update from our December leaks, well, keep refreshing that source link boy, it'll be available shortly. Update: It's live.
Engadget's Holiday Gift Guide: Desktops
Welcome to the Engadget Holiday Gift Guide! The team here is well aware of the heartbreaking difficulties of the seasonal shopping experience, and we want to help you sort through the trash and come up with the treasures this year. Below is today's bevy of hand curated picks, and you can head back to the Gift Guide hub to see the rest of the product guides as they're added throughout the holiday season. Let's face it, not everyone needs (or wants) to carry their computer around on the daily routine. Sacrificing portability can have its advantages -- and while nettops and all-in-one PCs have become a much more dominant force this year, the traditional, highly upgradeable desktop tower is still the reigning bang-for-the-buck champ. Just make sure your certain special someone has enough desk real estate for whatever potentially-enormous chassis you decide to take home and wrap. %Gallery-80501%
HP leaks forthcoming Radeon GPUs, Core i3 CPUs, Hulu and Netflix software integration
We've come across a bonanza of information about HP's Spring 2010 plans for North America. Kicking off the new year in style will be Pavilion desktops featuring a choice between ATI's Radeon HD 5350 (code named Evora Cedar), which will have HDMI, DVI and VGA ports along with 1GB of onboard memory, or the juicier Radeon HD 5570 (aka Jaguar), which bids adieu to VGA in favor of DisplayPort and bumps up the memory allowance to 2GB. Core i3-5xx and Core i5-6xx machines are also slated for the early part of 2010, based on that energy-conscious Clarkdale core we've already seen, with the difference being that Turbo Boost and higher L3 cache (4MB versus 3MB) will be available on the higher numbered chips. Arrandale fans need not despair either, as HP's TouchSmart 600 all-in-ones will be getting upgrades to Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs based on that architecture. Finally, on the software side, HP is introducing native Hulu and Netflix to its MediaSmart software suite. Check out the gallery below for more, and let the waiting begin! %Gallery-79908%
HP TouchSmart 300 and 600 bump the software to the next level, tx2 comes along for the ride
While the hardware on the outside looks to hardly be a departure from the norm for HP's TouchSmart line, there's some exciting stuff going on under the hood. Of course, multitouch is the big buzz this season with Windows 7 onboard and those fancy Surface apps are fine to play with, but more important is what HP is doing with its own TouchSmart application. It's added panes for Hulu, Netflix, Twitter and an HP Music Store powered by Rhapsody, which work in nicely with the rest of the touch-friendly apps onboard and a bit of underlying Microsoft technology keeping things humming -- like a nice big handwriting pane for quick Rhapsody searches. There's also a voice controlled recipe app that can capture recipes from popular recipe sites and read them out loud to you, and the photo app can hook up with a phone over Bluetooth and pull off photos. The other big new touch is the addition of HDMI and composite inputs, specifically for use with gaming consoles on the colorful 20-inch (300) and 23-inch (600) screens. What we would've really liked to see at this point would be a bit of that stylus-friendly capacitive Wacom tech, since a computer like this is dying to be turned into an easel, but this infrared camera-based stuff will have to do for now. HP had to hit these friendly $899 and $1,049 respective pricepoints somehow. Specs are nothing too special, but TV tuners, discrete graphics and Blu-ray are all in the offing. Meanwhile, HP's tossing all that fancy new software onto the TouchSmart tx2 convertible multitouch tablet, which starts at $800, and the dv3 is also getting a touchscreen as rumored -- thought details are slim there. The tx2 and 600 launch on October 22, while the 300 lands November 1. %Gallery-75369% %Gallery-75370%
