The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
A very cool product is the HP Photosmart A826 Compact Photo Printer which looks like a mini digital photo processing station, or like an ATM for photos.
The difference is that it will happily sit on the kitchen benchtop or look good in the living room. Coupled with a 7-inch colour touch screen, all the functions including basic photo editing and even drawing onto existing pictures pre-printing them out can be achieved with your finger or by using the included sylus.
HP also demonstrated an updated and snappier interface for their AMD-powered HP Touchsmart PC IQ780 – a desktop computer with a massive touch screen, sort of a cross between a desktop computer, a large ‘desktop replacement’ notebook computer and a Tablet PC thanks to the included stylus (and keyboard and mouse). The all-in-one design looks very snazzy and the “family organizer” type software included still runs in the Windows Media Center shell but has been sped up to dramatically increase performance.
The Touchsmart PC works with both a fingertip or the included stylus, with HP having done an excellent job of transforming the Windows Vista operating system into something much friendly for people using their fingers to tap buttons, use features and be creative instead of forcing them to use a stylus all of the time.
The experience is actually quite cool, and with a new software update, the Touchsmart PC has become an even better computer. It doesn’t yet do ‘multi-touch’ like the Apple iPhone, but it’s something HP are working on for future models, and no doubt Microsoft too.
A new ‘Elite’ series of desktop computer, called The HP Pavilion Elite m9000 Series Entertainment Desktop PC, ups the ante to competitors with an innovative one touch back up solution, a fantastic cable management system that hides USB and other cables under a panel on the top of the computer, a built-in TV tuner and a dual format combo drive which plays both Blu-ray and HD DVD movies, and burns CDs and DVDs, while coming in a terabyte confirmation if desired and an Intel Core 2 Quad processor.
HP’s notebook computers have been market leaders in Australia according to HP, party thanks to a strong feature set that delivers performance, but also through really stylish design that has just been updated once more.
HP’s biggest portable is codenamed ‘The Dragon’, and comes with a 20.1-inch screen, which reminded me of a similar model from Dell sometime last year, with both models giving a new meaning to the term ‘desktop replacement’.
In addition, a thin Windows Mobile 6 PDA (but without phone features) is being launched as the HP iPAQ 122, while a GPS ‘Travel companion’ called the iPAQ 312 that does GPS mapping navigation and plays media files
HP’s new range will see it compete strongly with all competitors, including a surging Apple who are enjoying more Mac hardware and software sales than ever before, coupled with the product hits that are the iPod and the iPhone.
Apple will likely continue growing well, but with HP’s shift of emphasis towards really making things easy for consumers while delivering stylish technology HP should find themselves retaining existing customers and finding more new ones that ever before, too.
Time will tell, but for now HP’s plans for bumper Christmas/end-of-year sales looks like they’ll easily meet or exceed HP’s expectations for the entire South East Asia region (which includes us here in Australia).
Not every model in HP’s new range features touch technology, but it inbuilt into most of the new lines we saw, showing that HP is taking touch screen technology very seriously.
Especially now that we live in a world where we all know about the iPhone and the iPod Touch, our expectations for interface designs, especially those meant to be used by touch, have all gone up tremendously to a new level.
HP’s done some great work on their new range and can be justifiably proud, but they can’t rest on their laurels – new iPhones and other Apple’s using touch technology as wonderfully as the iPhone does are surely on the way in 2008, not to threaten only HP but all their competitors, which should make for some very interesting product launches next year.
Until then, if you’re looking to buy a PC or PC peripherals, HP’s new range certainly has some unique features that set them apart from the rest and are definitely worth considering.
Touch technology is a major feature for HP across a range of technology, and now for us all. HP’s challenge now is to sell lots of stock this Christmas and feverishly work to continue simplifying the computing experience and bring multi-touch and more to the HP technology platform.
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
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