Bumptop appears on new HP TouchSmart convertible
The Consumer Electronics Show is gearing up in Las Vegas, and with it comes literally thousands of new product announcements. There’s nothing better in January than looking at the geek toys you’ll be wanting NEXT Christmas.
One of the announcements that caught my eye is HP’s TouchSmart tm2. The specs themselves are pretty solid. Windows 7 with a Core 2 Duo, ATI graphics in a fairly thin (but not truly slim) 12.1″ touchscreen which works with both fingers and stylus, and an expected 9 hours of battery life all for less than $1000 make for a decent little machine. What makes it more interesting is that HP has preloaded the machine with Toronto based Bumptop interface.
Last spring we gave the Bumptop OS add-on a whirl on the non-touch Acer Aspire One. That article was called “Bumptop: An OS add-on in need of a form factor“, and it looks like someone was listening. HP has added their own interface on top of previous touch machines (whether convertibles or all-in-ones), but the addition of Bumptop looks very welcome indeed. With the release of Windows 7, Bumptop added multitouch support, and a number of special gestures to make navigating a 3D environment easier with your fingers. If you’re not familiar with Bumptop, it’s a 3D desktop metaphor, and one of the few 3D interfaces I found actually useful, even without a touchscreen.
The inclusion of Bumptop on the tm2 is the first I’ve heard of a major company pre-installing it, but I suspect that as convertibles and slate PCs become more popular, it won’t be the last. There’s no release date announced for the tm2 in Canada, but if you want to try out Bumptop on your own machine, you can get the free or pro version ($29) from their website.
[…] it made for an interesting UI for touch screen computers. Earlier this year BumpTop appeared on HP’s tm2 convertible laptop, as well as releasing a verison for Mac OS […]