About 18 months ago, the giant PC maker brought out an unusual desktop computer called the TouchSmart, a bulky model meant for kitchen counters. It was intended as a walk-up home kiosk, with large icons you could activate by merely touching them to check the weather or to consult your calendar.

This TouchSmart was praised for its originality, but it wasn’t as practical as promised, and wasn’t a big hit. Still, H-P is persevering with the concept. It has refined the hardware and the touch-controlled software, and has come up with a new line set to go on sale by mid-July.

This new TouchSmart, which comes in two models priced at $1,299 and $1,499, is a relatively slim, one-piece desktop with a large 22-inch screen. It resembles the Apple iMac or the Dell XPS One and, like the latter, runs Microsoft’s Windows Vista. It has a wireless keyboard and mouse, and can be used as a normal Vista computer.

But, like the first TouchSmart, this new model comes with H-P’s touch-controlled user interface and special programs designed to be manipulated with your fingers. For this model, H-P is de-emphasizing the idea that the machine is meant for the kitchen, but it is forging ahead strongly with the notion that touch control is the wave of the future.

After testing the new TouchSmart PC for a few days, my verdict is mixed. The TouchSmart software is indeed improved. It’s attractive, more versatile and more practical — and fun to use. The hardware is handsome and well-equipped. And H-P deserves credit for continuing to build software expertise in a world where makers of computers and cellphones must become as expert at software as they are at hardware. But the latest effort has some problems.

The TouchSmart interface is inviting. There’s a top row with huge icons, called tiles, displaying your favorite programs, and a bottom row of smaller tiles for other programs. You can scroll each row with a finger and decide which programs go in which row. You can even include in either row not only TouchSmart programs, but the regular Windows programs or Web sites that you like. When you tap on a tile that isn’t for a special TouchSmart program, the computer pops you into the regular Windows interface. To return to the TouchSmart interface, you just tap a home button below the screen.

Hewlett-Packard’s TouchSmart

The TouchSmart software includes a calendar, a weather widget, a clock, music and video players, a program for composing short notes, and even a basic Web browser. All worked OK in my tests, but they’re simple and limited.

The computer itself is fairly powerful. Both models have dual-core processors, large hard disks, and a whopping 4 gigabytes of memory. And both run the special 64-bit version of Vista, which allows more memory usage and can be much faster than regular Vista, but only if you buy special 64-bit software programs. This machine is loaded with every conceivable port and connector, mostly hidden from view, and the high-end model even has a TV tuner.

But this is still a Vista computer, with all of the disadvantages that entails, especially a sluggish start-up and an annoying barrage of pop-up warnings. And the new TouchSmart is preloaded with craplets, those irritating trial programs and come-ons that you didn’t order.

There’s a built-in Webcam that works in low light, but it’s almost impossible to tilt the computer forward to get the best shot. Plus, the TouchSmart software interface is very basic and is ragged around the edges. It isn’t a multitouch interface — like the ones on the Apple iPhone and in the next version of Windows, code-named Windows 7, that recognize a variety of gestures and perform different tasks when multiple fingers are used rather than just one. For example, you can’t rotate a photo on the TouchSmart by grabbing it with your fingers, or move back and forth through Web pages by swiping the browser with your fingers.

The TouchSmart software is just a thin shell plopped on top of Vista, and it crashed on me four times during the course of a few days of testing. Also, the limitations of the TouchSmart applications can be frustrating. The photo application wouldn’t let me create albums. The music application didn’t display artist names for some of my MP3 files, and the calendar application can’t display an onscreen reminder of an event if you’re working in the main Vista interface.

If you’re intrigued by the idea of a quick and simple interface on a handsome one-piece Vista machine, the TouchSmart might make sense. But it doesn’t deliver on the full promise of touch computing.

• Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

This interface is generally called “multitouch,” and it involves using one or more fingers on a screen or touchpad to perform special gestures that manipulate lists or objects on a screen — without moving a mouse, pressing buttons, turning scroll wheels or striking keys.

The best-known example of the interface is on Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch devices. It allows you, for example, to rapidly flip through photos, lists of emails or song titles by merely “flicking” a fingertip on its screen, or to resize a photo by “pinching” the image with two fingers. And, this month, Apple moved some of these multitouch features onto a laptop, its new MacBook Air, where fingertip actions are performed on an oversized touchpad rather than on a screen.

Apple didn’t invent the multitouch concept. Academic and commercial researchers, and small, obscure companies, have been working on it for years. Apple is adapting the concept, adding its own ideas and popularizing it — just as it did in the 1980s with the mouse and the graphical user interface, which had also been invented elsewhere.

Rival companies are scrambling to add multitouch features to laptops and other digital gadgets. Synaptics, a leading supplier of touchpads for laptop makers who compete with Apple, has announced that shortly it will incorporate several multitouch features into its touchpads. Microsoft is producing a coffee-table-size computer called the Surface, meant for hotels, casinos and retail stores, that uses multitouch finger gestures to move around digital objects such as photos, play games and browse through product options. Hewlett-Packard developed a prototype of a similar multitouch coffee-table computer for home use.

Rotating a photo on Apple’s MacBook Air

And, in the back rooms of this month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, various cellphone makers, seeking to emulate the iPhone, were showing off their own unannounced efforts at multitouch. One prominent cellphone maker, Taiwan-based HTC, has already built a phone, called the Touch, which slaps a rudimentary multitouch interface on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system.

The basic touch screen, of course, is an old and familiar thing. People use them every day to get money from ATMs or to check into flights at airport kiosks. Microsoft’s Tablet computers and Palm’s Treo cellphones, among others, use touch screens that employ styluses or fingers to move cursors, select icons and other items, and even to write on the screen.

But multitouch interfaces are potentially much more versatile. They allow you to use your fingers to manipulate virtual objects on a screen as if they were real, sort of the way Tom Cruise’s character did in the 2002 Steven Spielberg science-fiction film, “Minority Report.” For example, Microsoft’s Surface allows users to rearrange groups of digital photos by just dragging them around on the table top as if they were actual paper prints.

Unlike the touch screens on, say, ATMs, multitouch devices are able to distinguish between the press of a single finger and the press of multiple fingers, and to interpret the motions or gestures you make. They take different actions depending on how many fingers they detect and which gestures a user performs.

On Apple’s MacBook Air, the touchpad still allows you to use one finger to move the cursor and click like a mouse can. But, optionally, it can do much more using multitouch gestures.

You can rotate photos by just touching two fingers to the touchpad and moving the images on the screen as you wish. You can quickly move back and forth through a series of Web pages or photos by “swiping,” or placing three fingers on the touchpad and moving them rapidly sideways. And you can shrink or expand a photo, or zoom in and out on a Web page, by pinching the image.

All recent Mac laptops, not just the new Air, have the optional ability to scroll through a screen without using any button or special zone on the touchpad. You just place two fingers, instead of one, anywhere on the touchpad and drag them across its surface.

In addition to pinching, the new Synaptics touchpads have a feature called “ChiralMotion,” which achieves rapid scrolling by moving two fingers in a circle anywhere on the touchpad. Another Synaptics feature, called Momentum, lets you emulate a trackball by flicking a single finger across the touchpad. This gesture can move an object on screen, like a virtual bowling ball in a game, with the illusion of inertia.

It’s too early to know if the new multitouch approach will ever be as big as the mouse-driven graphical user interface. But it’s already evident that it offers real advantages on devices where a mouse isn’t possible or convenient to use, or the decades-old interface of menus and folders is too cumbersome.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

That may sound like Apple’s heavily publicized iPhone, which runs on the AT&T wireless network, but it’s not. This phone is called the Voyager, and it’s made by LG and runs on the rival Verizon Wireless network.

Despite their superficial similarities, the two devices are very, very different. In fact, Verizon’s public-relations people are at pains to say the Voyager isn’t intended as an “iPhone killer” or even a “smart phone.”

Still, the Voyager is worth a close look, if only because it is one of the first competitors that attempts to mimic Apple’s touch interface, and many of its functions overlap the iPhone’s.

The Voyager beats the iPhone in certain respects. Unlike Apple’s product, it runs on a fast, 3G data network. And my experience has been that Verizon’s network has better coverage than AT&T’s in many cities, especially on the East Coast. It also costs less: $299, after a rebate, with a two-year service contract, compared with $399 for the iPhone.

In addition, the Voyager has GPS and thus provides real-time navigation, a capability the iPhone currently lacks. And the Voyager can even receive live TV programs for an extra monthly fee of $15, though it gets only eight channels and its TV function works only in certain cities.

A big advantage of the Voyager for some people is that it has a physical keyboard for typing in addition to the kind of virtual onscreen keys that are the iPhone’s only method for entering text. This keyboard is revealed by opening the phone, which then resembles a little laptop with a display that’s separate from the outside touch screen. I found that typing worked pretty well. For folks who insist on a physical keyboard, this is a big deal.

Finally, LG has enhanced the Voyager’s touch screen with feedback: When you tap an icon or scroll through a list, you get a light physical sensation.

But the Voyager is bulkier than the sleek iPhone — about 50% thicker and 40% larger overall — even though it’s a tad lighter. And it lacks the iPhone’s ability to use Wi-Fi hot spots and home networks, which are often faster than Verizon’s 3G network. It also has only about half the battery life; a smaller, lower-resolution screen, and just a fraction of the Apple’s internal memory. (Unlike the iPhone, the Voyager lets you add memory cards, but it doesn’t come with any.)

Most importantly, the Voyager suffers badly in the area where Apple’s phone shines: software. Whether Verizon considers it a direct iPhone competitor or not, the LG product tries to do many of the same things, and it generally falls short.

This is the true challenge that the iPhone poses to established phone makers like LG. Apple has managed to build into its phone a real PC-grade operating system with a breakthrough user interface and elegant programs, something that has eluded the major cellphone makers.

As with so many of the new feature-packed mobile phones, the Voyager’s user interface is clumsy and confusing, requiring too many steps to perform simple tasks. And its applications, such as the photo organizer, music player, Web browser and email program, are primitive compared with the iPhone’s.

In fact, the Voyager, bafflingly, has several different user interfaces — two on the outer touch screen and an entirely different one on the inner screen above the keyboard that doesn’t work by touch at all. Some functions work only with the inner screen.

Scrolling through lists with the Voyager’s touch screen is a halting, frustrating process compared with the smooth, slick scrolling on the iPhone. Its touch functions are old style and basic compared with the new “multitouch” approach that Apple built into the iPhone. Unlike the iPhone, the Voyager doesn’t allow you to “flick” through photos or other screens, or to use two fingers to enlarge or shrink photos or Web pages. It also doesn’t automatically change photos or Web pages from portrait to landscape view by just turning the phone.

In addition, while the Voyager’s Web browser can show real Web-page layouts, I found it to be far inferior to the iPhone’s browser, which shows entire pages and then zooms in on the parts you want to read with a couple of finger taps.

Apparently because the Voyager isn’t considered a business tool or smart phone, its email function isn’t included on any of the main menus or even located under the envelope icon labeled “messaging.” To find it, you have to wade through multiple menus with unhelpful names like “Tools on the Go.”

Even doing something as simple as entering flight mode — which turns off a phone’s internal radios for use on a plane and takes two steps on the iPhone — requires five steps on the Voyager.

Verizon is promising to improve the Voyager, but right now it’s a classic example of how the leading cellphone makers are going to have to step up their games, especially in software, to match Apple’s upstart device.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online free at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.