HP TouchSmart 300-1115uk and 600-1040uk early review: Multi-touch sensitive PCs

Touchscreens are well and truly part of our daily lives, from ticket machines to smart phones, but they've yet to find a place in our homes. The HP TouchSmart 300-1115 and 600-1040 are part of the latest generation of touchscreen all-in-one PCs shown to us by PC World at a recent showcase event. We like the idea of swooshing, swiping and poking our computers, so we gave them a go and tried to think how we'd use them in everyday life.

We kick off with the HP TouchSmart 300-1115uk, which has a 20-inch touchscreen. It packs an AMD Athlon II X2 chip, 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive. The TouchSmart PCs come with Windows 7, which supports multi-touch, and have HP's own touch-sensitive interface on top. This gives easy access to media such as photographs and music. Photos give instant gratification on a touchscreen, and two-handed resizing, rotating and zooming is a blast.

Further up the range is the 23-inch HP Touchsmart 600-1040uk all-in-one PC. It includes a DVD rewriter and packs a 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T6400 processor with 4GB DDR3 memory. A whopping 1TB hard drive holds your stuff, and the looks are handled by a 256MB Nvidia GeForce G200 graphics chip.

Both models offer 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The 600-1040 also includes a digital TV tuner. The idea of all-in-ones is that they're freed from the desktop and the restraint of separate towers, and a TV tuner could place it at the heart of the living room. The touchscreen means a keyboard isn't necessary, so the all-in-one could sit on a shelf or a kitchen counter. We like the idea of wandering into our kitchen of a morning, grease-dripping bacon sarnie in one hand, idly scrolling email or news feeds with the other. We wouldn't pay a grand for it though.

Click through our gallery for more of the TouchSmarts in action, and let us know your thoughts on touchscreen PCs in the comments.