HP Pavilion tx2500 hands-on report: Most promising HP tablet yet

Out of the multitude of new notebooks HP announced yesterday, only one was a pen-enabled Tablet PC.  Lest you think the company is leaving the format behind, however, it’s turning out to be one heck of a tablet.  The Pavilion tx2500 uses a 12.1-inch WXGA (1280 x 800) dual-touch display (which responds to both an accurate, wireless, battery-free pen, and to a finger) and AMD’s latest Puma platform.  TabletPCReview had a chance for some hands-on time with the tx2500, and their first impressions are very good.

Unlike some rival machines, the Pavilion tablets seem to do a better job of bridging niche pen-computing markets and home media and entertainment use.  The tx2500 packs a remote (that hides in the ExpressCard slot when not used) and has built-in Altec Lansing speakers which “quite frankly outperforms the speakers on many 15.4″ notebooks”. 

While they couldn’t run any benchmarking on the new Turion X2 Ultra CPU, playback of an HD movie clip they’d taken with them suggested the tx2500 is capable of “video performance similar to a low-end dedicated graphics card in a current-generation notebook.”  Frankly, this looks like it could easily maintain HP’s lead in consumer-grade Tablets, and I’m keen to see the first reviews.