Getting To Know The Touchscreen Experience, Continued

The slickness of the interface is also undermined by the laggy load times when moving between applications, some jerkiness in the animations and the general flakiness of Media Center.

More specifically, things take a bit of a dive if you hit the internet icon within SmartCenter in the hope of some slick touch-enabled web browsing. You’ll be spat out of SmartCentre and presented with a distorted version of Internet Explorer 7. The enormous titlebars and buttons certainly help with manipulating the browser window and selecting favourites and other short cuts finger-stylee.

But there’s no getting away from the fact that websites are built for the mouse-and-keyboard masses. Most websites are also essentially bitmap-based and non-scalable. Consequently, hitting links and selecting text with one’s paws can be a tricky process. And when it comes to manually inputting URLs or typing in text boxes, well, there’s no realistic alternative to falling back to the wireless keyboard. That said, it’s probably safe to defenestrate the IQ770’s wireless mouse. It’s entirely realistic to get by without it.

As for navigating the rest of the Windows Vista interface via the touchscreen, on the whole, it works at least as well as you might hope. The touchscreen itself is pretty accurate and the right and left click functionality is intuitive. So long as you select “Optimise for touch” in the HP suite, the Vista interface will also serve up tweaked. oversized titlebars, menus and fonts throughout.

Again, it makes life a lot easier when fingering your way through Vista. But just as with webpages, there’s no avoiding the fact that Vista simply wasn’t designed to be manually manipulated. It’s also worth noting that the touchscreen tweaks to the Vista interface also break the formatting of tool bars in some applications, making buttons disappear and the application essentially non-functional.