Digital Trends

HP tx1000 April 24th, 2007 | by Justin Whitaker

Features and Design

The design of the HP tx1000 is meant to fuse together sleek styling and ease-of-use features, along with a tablet-enabled screen and enough horsepower to run multiple applications under Windows Vista Home Premium edition – definitely no small task. For an entertainment notebook that will be used for so many different types of activities – taking handwritten notes, watching DVDs, listening to music, web conferencing with both audio and video, playing games, and all other general productivity tasks – the physical characteristics of the notebook become extremely important. Fortunately, the tx1000 product designers did a thorough job envisioning all of these types of activities when planning the physical layout of the notebook.

The most notable physical feature of the notebook is the convertible screen that rotates a full 180 degrees and then folds flat to operate in tablet mode. With the extended length of the six-cell battery on the bottom of the laptop, it is easy to hold the entire machine with one hand while using the other hand to take notes. Switching back to normal PC mode is as simple as rotating the screen back around 180 degrees to the standard laptop viewing position. For left-handers, there is a button just below the display screen that changes the screen orientation (which is a nice touch – they won't have to change any software settings in order to use the tablet functionality).

In addition to the screen orientation button, there are additional control buttons surrounding the screen for DVD/CD playback and opening the Vista Mobility Center. The keyboard layout provides enough space for a full-sized keyboard, although I was annoyed by the half-sized shift key on the right side of the keyboard. The keypad provides a bit less tactile feedback than I am accustomed to, but it provides overall good response and never faltered during testing. The touchpad incorporates an interesting design concept that departs from the typical manufacturer approach to touchpad design. Dozens of depressed dots, which are again imprinted into the case materials, form the touchpad area. A slim set of the same depressed dots form the scroll control area directly to the right of the touchpad area.

Both the interior and exterior finish of the laptop is imprinted with a swirling, wave-like pattern that gives the laptop a more friendly look than the typical all-black or all-steel colored industrial-looking laptop. The swirl design is a resin actually built into the case material so that it does not fade or collect any dust from the external environment, which is a nice assurance that the laptop will continue to look new and not show its age for a long time after the first use.

The tx1000 includes dual headphone jacks and the standard assortment of USB 2.0, network, media card, ExpressCard, and VGA / S-Video output connections. It also includes a small remote control that can be used for media functions, such as playing DVDs and controlling the volume. Thankfully, all of these design features and the tablet screen do not add to the weight of the laptop. The dimensions of 1.5” H x 12” W x 8.75” D and weight of 4.2 lbs. with 4-cell battery, or 5 lbs. with 6-cell battery, make the tx1000 light enough to be classified as an ultraportable.

Features and Specifications :

• AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-60 (2.0GHz with 512KB cache)
• 2048MB DDR2 SDRAM (2x1GB)
• 12.1 WXGA Brightview Widescreen Display with Integrated Touch-screen
• 160GB 5400RPM Hard Drive
• LightScribe Super Multi 8X DVD+/-RW w/Double Layer
• Windows® Vista Home Premium Edition
• 6-cell Lithium-ion Battery with Additional 4-cell Battery
• nVidia GeForce Go 6150 with Shared Graphics Memory
• 5-in-1 Media Card Reader
• 1.3 Megapixel Webcam
• Fingerprint Reader
• HP Mini Remote Control
• Integrated Audio and Altec Lansing Stereo Speakers, Dual Headphone Jacks, Microphone Jack
• Integrated 802.11a/b/g WLAN & Bluetooth
• Integrated 10/100 Ethernet Adapter

The tx1000 offers a minimal number of configuration options. At the time of publishing, the base price of the tx1000 is $1099, and listed upgrade options include a faster AMD Turion X2 CPU, RAM of up to 2GB, and a hard drive of up to 200GB (as well as a number of typical software and accessory upgrades). One of the notable exceptions in the tx1000 configuration options is the inability to upgrade to a more powerful graphics card. The NVidia GeForce Go 6150 graphics chip is fine for most day-to-day tasks and handles all of the new Vista graphical features, but the lack of a more powerful graphics card rules out using this laptop for any gaming or heavy-duty video-editing tasks.

Image Courtesy of HP