** WARNING: You can not mount this via VESA out of the box like the announcements describe, a special part must be ordered **
Now that I have my warning out of the way, Michelle purchased a HP TouchSmart IQ816 for the house so we could hang it on the wall so we could easily interact with the machine to leave notes, add calendar events, review pictures, and watch Blue-ray movies. I have to coolest wife, I know…
The machine arrived yesterday and man is it big. I would see why you would not want to have this thing on a desk, but that is the only option you have with it as it comes out of the box. The VESA mount that everyone reported this thing having is not something you can’t buy at a store and it does not come in the box. You have to order it from the HP parts site, but they actually have great turn around time. I ordered mine last night at 6:30pm and paid for next business day morning delivery and it is on the truck this morning set for delivery. That is fast. The part ended up only costing me $80 after shipping, but it is definitely something I would have ordered with the machine if I knew about it. Now you do, so order it if you want to hang your HPTS.
The VESA mount, which can be purchased here, only works for the IQ800 Series and not the previous versions.
Back to the review, the machine is fast, the touch surface is very responsive. However, the TouchSmart applications need some work. The music player doesn’t like Zune marketplace music (does hook to iTunes natively) and the Calendar doesn’t like Yahoo, just Google. These should have been much more configurable.
I am going to look into the SDK to see if I can create a Flickr Touchsmart application, but if all else fails, I will just create a cool Flickr WPF application for it instead.
I will do another review tomorrow or Friday after I get this mounted on the wall and can start using it for the purposes I purchased it for.