Elsewhere in our reviews section, we've taken a look at a quintet of everyday Vista laptops. This one is a bit different.
Like the TouchSmart IQ770, the Pavilion comes with a touchscreen display that allows you to fire up applications with a few taps. You get a stylus and a tiny remote control, or you can just use your finger to start up the HP's many functions.
There's a dedicated button to launch the HP QuickPlay interface, allowing single-touch access to the audio recorder, image browser and media player. Further buttons control music and film playback - but these should have been larger for ease of selection.
The responsiveness of the touchscreen was quite disappointing, often requiring a few repeated taps with a finger, although the stylus is more effective. The TouchSmart IQ770 benefits from a much larger viewing area, and its technology seemed more accurate at detecting responses.
The Pavilion has another innovation up its sleeve: the 12.1in screen can swivel through 360 degrees, enabling you to turn it around, close the lid and use the laptop as a normal tablet PC. It's also easy to find the ideal viewing angle for a film. This feature is valuable, since the screen isn’t of the best quality - images could be slightly difficult to make out at certain angles. Indeed, text wasn't really crisp enough in general.
The laptop's specifications are fairly solid. AMD's Turion dual-core processor is powerful enough to run applications smoothly, 120GB should be plenty of storage space and the 5-in-1 media slot is useful. We also liked the dual headphone jacks.
Click here to read our review of Windows Vista.
