Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

We recently purchased two HP Touchsmart PCs for the Arts Learning centre. Our goal is to encourage our faculty members to experiment with new touch based user interface which would allow us to observe and develop new applications to enhance their teaching experiences. HP TouchSmart is an all-in-one computer, similar to an iMac. It has a touch-sensitive screen, allowing users to control the navigation using their fingers. With the built-in HP navigation software, users can scroll through menus and files using their hands very much like using an iPhone.

My colleagues and I got excited and opened up one to play around during our weekly staff meeting. We soon found some pros and cons about this new PC:
PROs:
- Relative accurate touch panel allows us to perform simple image manipulations and video editing easily using standard Windows software such as Photoshop and Premiere
- A very bright and large screen makes the viewing experience pleasant
- To many less-technical learners, touching the screen is much more comfortable and intuitive when learning new web applications and image databases
- Very straight forward to set up, took less than 10 minutes to initialize the PC, my grandma can do it without hassling me
- The built in microphone and camera makes it to be very convenient for video conferencing
- No wires other than the power cord, makes it essential to mount on the wall, saves desktop spaces. The wireless keyboard and mouse works instantly and pretty far ranged

CONs:
- No Ethernet connection, only wifi, this requires the users to have a decent speed wireless connection when using the SmartTouch
- No multi-touch function, it would be cool if one can manipulate images like using an iPhone, but can not do with this PC, don’t know if it’s the hardware limitation or the software limitation
- The unit is very heavy, my grandma won’t be able to move it
- The HP navigation platform is rather slow when it comes to high resolution images or video

We will present this to the general Arts faculty members, will see how they would react to the new UI and input method.