Are you ready for a PC-cum-TV?

The HP TouchSmart IQ770 is a clear indication of a PC's evolution path. It has a touch-screen interface and also doubles up as a TV, personal video recorder and MP3/CD/DVD player.

The guts of the HP TouchSmart IQ770 are laptop-like components that have been custom-fitted into a compact desktop unit. The base unit houses an Asus motherboard built around an Nvidia GeForce Go 6100 chipset, a dual-core AMD Turion 64 processor running at 1.6GHz, 2GB of dual-channel DDR 2 memory (a realistic amount to run the full version of Vista) and GeForce Go 7600 graphics with 256MB of dedicated RAM. The TouchSmart's 19-inch widescreen display functions as both a viewing screen and a navigation tool.

Microsoft's Tablet PC concept produced a lot of smoke, but precious little to fire the imagination. The trouble is, touchscreens are expensive to implement, and the Windows Desktop graphic user interface is, sadly, inadequate for the average prodding finger.

With Touchsmart, HP seems to have realised that there is a need to make some software intervention to make a touchscreen Windows PC work and while Vista's interface scaling makes a big difference in itself, it's HP's SmartCentre software (essentially a plug-in for Vista's improved Media Centre interface) that adds the smart touch. Touch the 'Home' button on the to launch it, and a set of big, friendly icons greets the user, ready to be customised.

It's fun to see the HP PhotoSmart Touch application turning the PC into a digital photo print station, kind of like the one you see at your local shopping mall.

Put a HP PhotoSmart A510 compact printer behind the screen and the photos slide out of the slot under the screen. Very cool stuff. HP has built a PC that competes with the current benchmark system, the Apple iMac, at least when it comes to design.

In fact, for the most part, HP hopes that people would use the TouchSmart as a 'screen' rather than a PC -- the mouse and keyboard can be neatly tucked away and the screen can be angled to be comfortably accessible from a standing position.

For watching TV or DVD, the screen will move straight on, and one can retire to a more comfortable spot with the Media Centre remote.

For playing music or listening to the radio, there's a keyboard button combination for turning off the screen, although it would be better to have a hardware switch on the unit itself. There are plenty of other buttons on the chassis, including volume and transport controls. The speakers are good too -- expect the same quality as with a TV.

The system, on the whole, produces above average performance when set alongside comparably-priced systems and HP Touchsmart IQ770 is no impulse buy at Rs 99,990.

Then again, you really should expect to get less performance for your money when you consider the sheer convenience and usability of the touchscreen technology.