HP TouchSmart tx2: Multi-touch for the masses

Hold on to your fingerless gloves, touch fans: HP has just announced the first consumer laptop with a multi-touch display. The TouchSmart tx2, it says, can recognise gesture inputs from a single finger, two fingers or a combination of finger and stylus.

The HP TouchSmart tx2 is based on the Pavilion TX2050ea we prodded back in April. It shares many of its features, such as a fingerprint reader, a webcam and a 12.1-inch touch-sensitive display, which can be rotated and folded against the keyboard so it operates in tablet mode.

The tx2 has more accurate input recognition than its predecessor. It supports gestures such as pinching and stretching for zooming, and stroking for horizontal and vertical panning. From what we can gather, however, multi-touch input is only possible when running HP's MediaSmart software. 

Final UK specs are yet to be confirmed, but in the US, consumers can equip the TouchSmart tx2 with an AMD Turion X2 dual-core CPU, ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics, up to 8GB of RAM and up to 400GB of disk space.

It'll go on sale in the UK in January for a starting price of £799.