Just in time for Christmas: HP's new lineup

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 23 October 2007 23:33

Opinion and Analysis

HP’s latest range of desktop PCs, notebooks, printers, a PDA, a GPS mapping and digital media playback device and a printing service continues design changes and interesting feature inclusions to strongly appeal to the broadest range of consumers worldwide.

HP’s technology over the past couple of years has seen a design change take place, modernising all their products with a classy, consistent look, adding interesting new features we’ll get to shortly and creating a range of notebook computers with striking yet subtle designs that immediately stand out from most competitors.

Part of HP’s effort has also revolved around finding out and focusing on what consumers want from their technology, how they use technology to accomplish a range of different tasks, and how to make that process ever simpler and easier today and in the future, instead of focusing on the technical details and specifications, which are still available to anyone wanting the information.

Christoph Schell, Vice President, Imaging & Printing and Consumer Group, HP South Pacific, explained HP’s new philosophy by saying that: “HP is  creating personal experiences in both the computing and printing markets, continually innovating and designing technology with the consumer at the centre of each stage of product development from choice, through to out of box experiences and ongoing  usage.  This new product range delivers the experiences that reflect consumers’ personal and professional lives.”

An example is in the area of printing, a key area for HP, and one they’ve dubbed Print 2.0.  Instead of talking about specifically about printers, HP wants to talk about printing, be it photos and documents, and through the Snapfish printing services, the bulk printing of photos, the production of photo books, calendars, mouse mats, fridge magnets, T-Shirt transfers, coffee mugs, jigsaw puzzles, canvas prints and more.

HP says this new mix will help transform the company from a leader in the printer market, to a leader in printing, whether at home or through the Snapfish service http://www.snapfish.com.au which is now available in Australia.

When it comes to printing documents, an interesting enhancement HP briefly demonstrated was their new ‘HP Smart Web Printing’ technology, allowing users to easily select either relevant parts of a website’s text and/or images (on a single or several pages from different sites), and print them without wasting paper and ink printing addition pages and text that didn’t need to be printed.

In addition to the Snapfish service, HP unveiled a fast A3 and A4 ink-jet printer, a fast document scanner, two dedicated photo printers (the HP Photosmart A826 Home Photo Center and the HP Photosmart A626 Compact Photo Printer) and a multifunction printer/scanner/copier, the HP Photosmart C8180 All-in-One that also included a range of memory card sockets and even an internal CD/DVD burner, allowing you (or anyone else) to easily transfer their photos from a memory card straight to a CD or DVD without needing to turn on the computer or get it involved. The CD/DVD drive can also burn Lightscribe discs.

So, what else is coming from HP, and is it enough to stop or slow down the Apple juggernaught? Please read onto page 2 for the conclusion...