HP's Pavilion Touchsmart Sleekbook has a touchscreen, surprisingly

HP's Pavilion Touchsmart Sleekbook comes with a touchscreen, surprisingly
You can touch that screen, if you like

There are two new Sleekbooks coming out of the HP camp this CES 2013, both rocking Windows 8 but only one with touch-ability.

The HP Pavilion Touchsmart Sleekbook is the tactilian one, obviously, managing to cram a 15.6-inch touch-panel display in where the HP Pavilion Sleekbook has a non-touch one.

You pay for this finger-friendliness in girth though, with the TouchSmart coming in at 23mm thick, whereas the Pavilion Sleekbook (non-touch) is 21mm.

Not hot heat

Both laptops come with replaceable batteries, gesture-friendly trackpads and HP's CoolSense tech that automatically adjusts how the machine disseminates heat based on how and where you're using it - no more toasty laps or overheating bases to worry about.

Both models come with AMD processors (hence Sleekbook, not Ultrabook); an AMD A8 with 6GB of RAM as a kicking off point for the TouchSmart, whereas the non-touch Pavilion starts with an A6 and 4GB of RAM.

The TouchSmart outdoes the non-touch edition on hard drive space too, coming with a minimum of 750GB versus the non-touch's 500GB.

The non-touch HP Pavilion Sleekbook beats the touch-enabled version on release date though, heading to the US later this month for $499; the Touchsmart edition should land in February from $699.

We're waiting to hear back from HP on international release dates and pricing, so stay tuned.

News Editor (UK)

Former UK News Editor for TechRadar, it was a perpetual challenge among the TechRadar staff to send Kate (Twitter, Google+) a link to something interesting on the internet that she hasn't already seen. As TechRadar's News Editor (UK), she was constantly on the hunt for top news and intriguing stories to feed your gadget lust. Kate now enjoys life as a renowned music critic – her words can be found in the i Paper, Guardian, GQ, Metro, Evening Standard and Time Out, and she's also the author of 'Amy Winehouse', a biography of the soul star.