HP TouchSmart 300: 20-Inch Multitouch All-in-One Has an HDTV Tuner
Nate Ralph
PC World - Dec 24, 2009 5:10 pm
HP is no stranger to the all-in-one market, having churned out a number of multitouch-capable machines under the TouchSmart line. But at $930 (as of 12/23/2009), the HP TouchSmart 300 occupies a somewhat peculiar niche.
At 20 inches, it's a bit small to serve as your primary media center, but it costs more than similarly sized budget all-inone PCs (20 inches or smaller). It also outperforms them all, scoring 98 on the WorldBench 6 test suite. This places the TouchSmart 300 well ahead of touch-enabled, budget-priced competitors like the 20-inch MSI Wind Top AE2010 (60), and tantalizingly close to pricier rivals like the 24-inch Sony Vaio L117FX/B (105). It also scored slightly higher than its larger sibling, the 23-inch HP TouchSmart 600 (92).
The star of the show is HP's custom TouchSmart software. It offers full-screen, touch-friendly widgets for media playback, browsing, and manipulating photos, and for accessing popular Web applications like Hulu, Pandora, and Twitter. But while the software is typically quite responsive, we found its performance on the TouchSmart 300 to be a bit sluggish.
(Adapted from http://www.pcworld.com/reviews.html)
