HP TouchSmart 520 review

HP was an early champion of the touchscreen all-in-one, with its first TouchSmart model appearing in PC Pro back in 2007. These days, though, the all-in-one market is largely dominated by the Apple iMac, and HP, Sony and the rest will be hoping Windows 8’s touch-focused revamp will provide a boost to popularity when it arrives later in the year.

Until then, HP is concentrating on doing up its own touch software. The TouchSmart 520 features a new tablet-influenced front-end, dubbed Magic Canvas, which relocates the familiar carousel of icons from the middle to the bottom of the 23in screen, with the bulk taken up by Android-style horizontally scrolling homescreens.

Those screens are decorated with the usual touchscreen all-in-one notes, doodles and graphics, and all of your standard desktop files and shortcuts are also reproduced ready for tapping on the Magic Canvas. The Carousel hosts a range of familiar music and video playback tools and a photo organiser, along with links to touch-optimised Facebook and Twitter clients.

The Magic Canvas and its apps are all perfectly competent, and it rarely stutters or slows down in use, but there’s little here that we haven’t seen on a slew of touchscreen systems in the past. There’s also no sign of the kind of apps that we’d like to see on these do-it-all PCs, such as Netflix or other streaming media services – although that’s hardly a criticism we’d level solely at HP. Generally, we still prefer Sony’s touch software, which is smoother and comes with both touch media controls and webcam-based gesture control.

The HP’s glossy 23in, 1,920 x 1,080 panel is as responsive and accurate as any touchscreen we’ve used, and it’s also clean and sharp to look at. An average Delta E figure of 5.1 means colours are pretty accurate, but neither the measured contrast ratio of 825:1 nor the 225.7cd/m2 brightness really jumps out. Images therefore lack the punch and vibrancy of the best we’ve seen from Sony or Apple.

Inside, the Core i3-2120 is low on Intel’s CPU roster, but its pair of Hyper-Threaded 3.3GHz cores ensures it’s got the power to cope with everyday applications. It scored a reasonable 0.7 in our Real World Benchmarks, not at all bad for an all-in-one.

The budget bites when it comes to gaming. Graphical power is provided by Intel’s HD 2000, which is the lesser of its two integrated graphics chips. There’s enough here to ensure HD media is played back smoothly, but if you want to play games on the HP you’ll have to stick to less demanding titles and old classics.

Elsewhere, there’s 4GB of RAM, a 1TB hard disk and a DVD writer, and we’re delighted to see an AVerMedia DVB-T TV tuner, so the HP does at least have living-room versatility. Two USB 3 ports on the left edge of the chassis can hook up to the latest super-speed external hard disks, or there are four USB 2 ports on the rear, and there’s a card reader to get your photos onto the big screen.

HP has opted for its Beats Audio speakers to provide an aural boost, and for the most part it works. There’s plenty of bass without them overpowering the rest of the range, good clarity at the high end, and it all goes up to a good volume. We noticed the mid-range sounded slightly muddy and a little squeezed, but this minor complaint won’t stop music or movies sounding better than they do on most all-in-ones. It’s fine for a small living room or a bedroom.

Finally, we should mention the efficiency of this PC, which draws a paltry 49W when idling at the desktop, and only rises to 82W when pushed hard with our benchmarks. That’s not bad at all considering the size of the device.

So it isn’t the flashiest or fastest of PCs, and we’ve still not seen much dedicated touch software that’s genuinely useful on a large desktop, but the HP TouchSmart 520 does enough to impress in key areas. It offers up some competent, sensibly designed software, a responsive and good-enough-quality screen, and a fine set of built-in speakers. Sure, you’ll find much better all-round devices from Sony and Apple if you have the cash to spend, but on a lower budget this is a good, affordable compromise.