It's hard to say if there's a market yet for an all-in-one touchscreen PC that you can just pick up and carry around, but it seems that no Windows PC maker wants to be left out. Hot on the heels of Dell's XPS 18, Sony's VAIO Tap 20, and the Asus Transformer AIO, Hewlett-Packard has announced the Envy Rove 20. It's a tabletop PC with a 20-inch touchscreen, a four-hour battery, and a spring-loaded kickstand that folds flat into the frame.
We got to check out the Rove 20 briefly at an HP event in San Francisco late last month, and we're not yet sure what to think. The 10-point capacitive touchscreen felt responsive, and the kickstand has a very satisfying action (you squeeze a button around back to release the lever as you set it down) but the machine still felt fairly thick and heavy for a machine designed to be carried around. It's quite a bit thicker than the Dell XPS 18, for instance, and the 1600 x 900 IPS touchscreen also isn't as crisp, clear or pixel-dense as the one we saw demonstrated on that unit.
It does, however, have quite a bit going on inside. HP includes Intel's latest Haswell processors, next-gen 802.11ac Wi-Fi, three USB ports, a 1TB hybrid hard drive, Intel's Wireless Display tech for connecting to a TV, as well as Beats Audio processing for specially tuned speakers that didn't sound half-bad to me. HP tells us it's aiming for a competitive price somewhere below $1,000, including a mouse and keyboard, when the Rove 20 arrives this July.