The screen has a response time of 8ms, which is a bit slower than the 5ms touted by most monitors. Still, unless you're going to be using the display for gaming, it will not make any difference. Touch screen responsiveness is immediate we didn't notice any lag between gestures being initiated and executed. It's great for switching between apps and will typically be suited to people who want to use it for multimedia content.
Another area where the touch screen excels is web browsing. The ability to click on links, pictures and videos (as well as pinch and zoom) brings the tablet experience to your desk. It also gives you a reason to use IE10 as the functionality is not yet working with other popular browsers such as Chrome or Firefox.
Pinching-to-zoom works wonderfully well on IE 10
Although the monitor is optimised for use with Windows 8, it will still work with a Windows 7 machine. We had to download the free Touch Pack for Windows 7 from Microsoft (240MB) before we could activate the touch screen.
However, we wouldn't recommend using the device with Windows 7. The experience was plagued with glitches - pinching-to-zoom was particularly inconsistent - with pages breaking when we tried to reformat them. To be fair, Dell isn't pitching this for use with Windows 7 devices.
Using the touch functionality in Windows 7 is not such a good experience
The onscreen keyboard has also been significantly improved for Windows 8. It has the same design as the keyboard found on Windows Phone devices.
We found it easy to enter small bits of text such as web addresses. It was reasonably good for entering long passages of text too. It took us 2 minutes and 15 seconds to type out a 79 word paragraph. Granted, this was double the time it took with a normal keyboard, but the touch screen felt comfortable, and with practice, typing can get significantly faster.
The onscreen keyboard will look familiar to Windows Phone users
