HP launches first multi-touch laptop, the TouchSmart tx2

While gawkers have been breathlessly predicting that Apple would be adapting its multi-touch technology for a tablet PC, the first laptop with a multi-touch screen is actually coming out from a quite different company: Hewlett-Packard.

Put simply: HP's TouchSmart tx2 adds a multi-touch screen to a traditional, convertible tablet computer. This means you can use a finger or two to draw on the screen, browse the web, click icons, and control media through HP's homegrown MediaSmart application. As with the iPhone, the screen uses a capacitive sensor so you don't have to press hard on the screen to register a tap or a trace. However, unlike the iPhone, if you want to do detail work (like writing in longhand or doing a detailed illustration), you can use the included pen to put a finer point on things.

Under the hood, the TouchSmart tx2 is still a Vista laptop, which means it has all the tablet functions of the standard Windows OS. (If you've never used a tablet, Vista includes write-on-the-screen features by default... but only if the hardware supports it.)

Some specs are on the lighter side, featuring your choice of AMD-based CPUs (no Intel here, sorry). The 12.1-inch screen is powered by an ATI Radeon HD 3200 CPU, and hard drives will range from 160 to 500GB. Wi-Fi is integrated, but there's no integrated WWAN feature available.

Because the TouchSmart is built on Windows, don't expect a radical departure from the current state of the art: Multi-touch trackpads have shown up on a few notebooks so far, and while the advances are interesting, they aren't revolutionary. HP, however, has a history of innovating software as well as hardware -- the MediaSmart application looks to be an interesting first step toward making fuller use of multi-touch, so watch this space to see what happens from here.

Prices start at a reasonable $1,150 (though that's tentative). The TouchSmart tx2 goes on sale tomorrow with shipping at the end of the month.