For years the computer industry has been pushing consumers on concept of the tablet PC. But save for a small percentage of professionals in specialized fields, the form factor has largely failed to catch on. While plenty of mobile phones have long since proven that consumers love touchscreens, on the whole, that love hasn't translated to the PC market.

Recently, however, Hewlett-Packard took some interesting baby steps in that direction when it first launched the TouchSmart "kitchen" PC. Designed for family use, the PC proved its usefulness when it came to multimedia, letting users get more hands-on with things such as digital photos.

The company is now looking to expand the relative success of the TouchSmart IQ816 all-in-one with a new touchscreen notebook. Introduced today, the TouchSmart TX2 is the first multi-touch tablet for Windows.

Like its predecessor in the TouchSmart line, the TX2's touch capabilities are largely focused on multimedia--flipping and expanding digital pictures and things of that nature. Some of the touch functionality extends to other apps, but it's fairly limited. We got some hands-on time with the computer earlier in the week, and the first thing HP showed us was the ability to launch HP MediaSmart by drawing an "M" with two fingers (even this simple gesture took some getting used to, however).

HP is also being a bit generous with the multi-touch classification: While it supports more fingers, the gestures at this point are still limited to two. An HP rep suggested that there were limited functions that might require more than two fingers, but Apple's new trackpads for the Macbook certainly make a different case.

Otherwise, the tablet is a lot like its predecessor, the Tx2000z. it features a 12-inch widescreen, a stylus, a dual-layer DVD burner, three USB ports, and a multi-card reader. Inside the tablet has a 250GB, 5400-rpm hard drive, a 2.2-GHz AMD Turion X2 ZM-82 processor, and 4GB of memory. Pricing starts at $1,149.

The notebook is hardly revolutionary. If anything, HP's primary objective with the computer seems to be testing the waters to see if the company can repeat what it did with the tablet's older sibling, perhaps assuring that "tablet" is no longer a dirty word in the notebook market. If that's going to happen, however, it's going to take a bit more functionality than the TX2 has to offer.