Product Reviews

HP clearly believes being small on its own isn't enough to make the tx1260ea beautiful. It's made every effort to create a miniature gem of a laptop. Like HP's current range of full-size portables, it's clad in stylish silver and black gloss and inlaidwith an understated oriental-style pattern of fine strokes that the company reckons improves scratch resistance. We just think it looks nice. Altogether, it's a glorious thing to behold, and at under £750 from dealers it's pretty reasonably priced, too, for a laptop that just about qualifies as ultraportable, except for being a little bit heavy.As always, though, it's what's inside that you're really paying for - and that requires slightly closer examination.

The first thing that struck us on opening the tx1260ea's lid was that the screen, once open, can swivel through 180 degrees, enabling it to be turned away from the user or even laid flat on top of the keyboard. Yes, the tx1260ea is a Tablet PC, and it comes with a special version of Windows Vista that makes it usable without a keyboard. Instead, there's a stylus that tucks neatly away under the laptop's body when not in use. It's handily attached to a leash to avoid it getting lost. This can be used to control the mouse pointer, or activate Windows input functions such as right mouse clicks using a system called Pen Flicks. It also enables you to write directly onto the screen; you can enter text by tapping an on-screen keyboard or using handwriting recognition. Tablet PCs can also excel at tasks for which users might usually reach for a graphics tablet, such as drawing or cutting out portions of images.

Tablet PCs have been around for a while, but their popularity has largely been restricted to business, particularly in tasks like stock control, and hospitals, where they can take the role of electronic clipboards. The Pavilion tx1260ea makes the technology much more accessible, but we found its 12.1 inch touchscreen rather unresponsive, requiring a lot of pressure to get the mouse pointer to move smoothly.

If you prefer to use the keyboard, it has a positive, clicky action and sensible layout, with only the function keys much reduced in size. Rather than the usual roughened surface, the trackpad has tiny indentations. It takes a little getting used to, but it's accurate.

Aside from its Tablet PC functions, the tx1260ea boasts a couple of other features that set it apart from the average laptop. To the left of the screen is a fingerprint scanner, enabling Windows to be protected using biometric security rather than a password. We found it hard to get our fingerprint positively identified a number of times, so

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we suspect it's the kind of feature that's best left to users for whom security is paramount. Inland Revenue employees, for example.

Elsewhere around the screen are a few handy shortcut buttons. One provides access to mobility functions such as power saving features; another rotates the screen display, handy if you're taking advantage of the tablet functions, or for presentations. There's also a button to access HP's QuickPlay software, a sort of poor man's Windows Media Center (though that's also included as part of Vista). A TV icon raised our hopes for a moment, but sadly the tx1260ea comes without a built-in tuner. It does, however, have a DVD drive and a multi-format memory card reader, so there are plenty of entertainment options. At the top of the screen is a pinhole webcam, now a fairly standard feature in all but the cheapest laptops. We were impressed with its frame rate and the quality of its images, even in difficult lighting conditions.

Count your shinies

The display itself is bright and crisp, with even illumination and good contrast. Its 1280x800 native resolution provides a high level of detail for such a small screen, with the downside that icons and text labels can seem very small. Our only real grumble is the highly reflective surface. This helped produce deep, rich blacks and dark shadows, improving contrast during movie playback, but also caused distracting reflections when we used the machine in brightly lit areas.

The built-in Altec Lansing stereo speakers were a pleasant surprise, providing far more atmospheric rumbles and booms than we'd have expected from a laptop. They also handled music well, at least at lowish volumes - not something you can say of many speakers built into portable PCs. Crank them up, though, and you'll soon find this laptop is no substitute for a hi-fi.

The tx is a good size for travelling, but at 2.55kg it's rather heavy for a portable DVD player. Most 12 inch laptops weigh under 2kg. And its battery, delivering less than two and a half hours' heavy use, will only just get you through a movie, though we've certainly seen worse.

So what about the HP's performance as a PC? Unfortunately, that's where the story gets a little less happy. The system is powered by a Turion64 X2 processor TL-56, AMD's answer to Intel's budget Core 2 Duo chips, with two cores running at 1.8GHz. Despite the fact that it's supported here by a whopping 2GB of RAM, the AMD chip's performance proved no match for rival Intel processors in our tests, giving the Pavilion a 2D (general) benchmark score of 117% - enough to cope with Vista, but not to inspire confidence for more ambitious tasks.

And while the tx1260ea did manage to run our demanding Call Of Duty 2 games test, at just 2.2 frames per second it certainly wasn't playable. That's thanks to a fairly lowly nVidia GeForce 6150 graphics card, which borrows 128MB of main memory rather than providing its own. The 160GB hard disk is quite adequate, but nothing special.

The HP tx1260ea is beautiful to look at, enjoyable to use and nicely compact, if a little heavy. But with lacklustre performance all round, it'll only be of interest if you specifically want a Tablet PC on a limited budget.