HP

According to BusinessWeek, Dell plans on taking aim at Apple and will unveil a solution that could see companies from a bunch of industries working together to create the first solution to give consumers real choice.

The idea will be unveiled in September and will attempt to give you more choice in how you buy and consume media, BusinessWeek reports. More importantly, Dell will give its partners the software they need to establish the solution and will try to turn a profit on the sale of hardware.

"Customers want access to content from a broad variety of sources--how, when, and where they choose," Michael Dell told the publication.

"Apple wants to lock you in," Robert Enderle said to BusinessWeek. "Dell wants to lock you in to choice."

But will all those choices translate into a profit and a new standard that will take iTunes and every other proprietary service down? Will buying a song on Amazon.com and sending "it to the mobile phone of a friend or the car stereo of someone who has satellite radio" really work?

Sure, it might appeal to us and I certainly think that's a neat idea, but based on the information we have, it sounds like there are too many moving parts and too many people involved in the decision-making to make this a viable service.… Read more

LOS ANGELES--This week's Siggraph conference attracted a diverse crowd of graphic designers, animators, and industrial designers, and both HP and Lenovo were on-site to show off their new mobile workstations for graphics professionals. I had a chance to meet with both companies at the show to talk about some of the key features of these new models.

HP started the week by announcing the 17-inch EliteBook 8730w and 15.4-inch EliteBook 8530w, both of which support Intel's not-yet-official quad-core Core 2 Extreme processors, 8GB of RAM, and Nvidia's next-generation Quadro FX cards with up to 1GB of VRAM. In addition, these latest EliteBooks feature a few small design enhancements, such as a new latch designed to reduce stress on the display and a special coating on the keys and touch pad to help prevent wear. Even cooler is the VGA camera on the display bezel, which pairs with included software to double as a business card reader.

The EliteBook 8730w is also the first workstation on the market to include an HP DreamColor display option. The RGB backlit-LED screen can display millions of colors and displays true color even when the screen is dimmed. I got a quick demo of the EliteBook 8730w and I was impressed with not only the stunning color quality but also the ease of switching back and forth between sRGB and Adobe RGB on the display.

Also remarkable: both the 15- and 17-inch EliteBooks were quite thin and sleek, especially for such high-powered machines.

After HP I moved on to get a glance at Lenovo's ThinkPad W700 workstation, which was announced Tuesday. The beast was even larger than I'd imagined; after all, Lenovo representatives have emphasized that it's a workstation first, and mobile computer second. It's obviously larger than HP's 17-inch workstation, but the ThinkPad W700 also packs some bonus features: a built-in color calibrator and an integrated digitizer pad next to the touch pad. … Read more

Update at 11:45 a.m. with additional information about Intel blogger.

Aaron Brezenski, the blogger, states the following in describing his posts: "Aaron Brezenski has been at Intel (Chandler, AZ) since 1995 and has been a product engineer for most of that time. He currently manages a team of product development engineers in STTD, but his nefarious purpose in (Intel Software Network) Blogspace is to highlight Intel Integrated Graphics in the Home Theater PC space from an end-user perspective."

An Intel engineer has posted a discussion about performance issues with its newest Centrino 2 graphics silicon.

The … Read more

I sat in on a group breakfast with HP Labs' Bernardo Huberman last week. He's the director of the Social Computing Lab. The press function was called so HP could tell us how the company is using modern social-networking tools to enhance its business.

Modern tools, that is, for 2005.

While Huberman has done innovative research showing how novelty and popularity interact on social sites (PDF) such as Digg and Facebook, the impact of this research on HP is notably old-fashioned.

First, we learned, HP uses algorithms derived from its research to juggle the product offerings presented to buyers … Read more

It's been a week of flashbacks, and not just because I went to a concert that featured '80s bands ABC and The Human League. I also (hypothetically) relived the '90s as the CNET laptop editors (hypothetically) debated the merits of touch pads versus pointing sticks. Turns out people are still very passionate about their preferred laptop mousing method; join the conversation by voting in our poll at the bottom of this post. Meanwhile, PC World flashed us back a decade or so by revisiting a classic debate: laptop or handheld?

Fortunately, we had some new releases to jolt us … Read more

eWeek has an interesting article up today detailing the difference in price currently being witnessed in the computing space, according to NPD. Based on the research firm's analysis, it estimates that the average Windows desktop is selling for about $550, compared to Apple's average desktop selling price of $1,543. The average Windows laptop in June was selling for $700, while Apple's laptops were going for a hefty $1,515.

After comparing comparably-equipped HP laptops with Mac notebooks, it became abundantly clear to me that Apple, although working hard to reduce prices on its computers, still has considerable work to do.

Right now, you can head over to HP's website and buy yourself a Pavilion dv7t sporting Windows Vista Home Premium, a 2.26Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, a 250GB hard drive, 2GB of RAM, and 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 9200M GS to display video on your 17-inch screen for just $1,217.99.

But if you chose the Mac, you'd be paying $2,799 for a MacBook Pro sporting a 2.5Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a 512MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics card, and a 250GB hard drive.

The list goes on. Mac Pros are substantially more expensive than comparably-equipped Dell machines, and aside from iMacs, which are far more competitively priced, you're not getting a bargain on any Apple product.… Read more

Hewlett-Packard will launch a 4-pound "ultralight" business notebook line based on Intel's Centrino 2 silicon this month.

The 12.1-inch HP-Compaq 2230s series packs Centrino 2 processors and Intel's newest GMA 4500MHD integrated graphics, which HP lists as "Microsoft DirectX 10 capable."

The weight is listed as starting at 4.07 pounds. By comparison, the Via processor-based HP 2133 Mini-Note (8.9-inch screen) is listed at 2.63 pounds.

Models start at $999 with a T5670 (1.80GHz) Core 2 Duo processor and range up to $1,649 for a model with a … Read more

Hey, remember when Nvidia issued that business update saying it was expecting to lose money repairing or replacing flawed graphics cards, but then declined to state which cards were affected and which manufacturers bought them?

Well, this week, both Dell and HP finally came out with a list of laptops that included the defective cards. Check your laptops, people, or you too may be treated to "multiple images, random characters on the screen, lines on the screen, no video" or even a "notebook (that) does not start."

Moving on, analyst group Gartner says the $100 laptop is a pipe dream, but the $200-$500 laptop is going strong. This week saw Intel's Classmate PC primed for a third-generation release; the MSI Wind started shipping with a 6-cell battery (though that bumps the price to $550); and Asus reportedly prepared an Eee PC 701 powered by Intel Atom chips.

That last item is apparently part of Asus' plan to cook up a total of 23 varieties of Eee PC over the coming months (or years, the timeline isn't clear). It's enough to make me wonder if Asus will continue to manufacture any non-Eee PC computers in the next few years. Or will we soon be receiving a press release announcing that Asus is changing the company name to Eee?

Meanwhile, memory maker Buffalo gets our carpe diem award for recognizing the market opportunity in DIY solid-state drives for the Eee PC. First runner-up is Samsung, which finally recognized business users as a prime market for the UMPC and added a few enterprise features to its Q1 Ultra. … Read more

Last month we reviewed the Canon Selphy CP760, a cute little dye-sublimation printer that won us over with its simple menu, quick prints, and most importantly, its small-ish price tag; $100 is a fairly easy price to swallow for a single function printer, especially when we've got so many inkjet printers that can not only print out similar quality photos, but can also print out text on standard 8 1/2 inch by 11 inch paper! In either case, we were impressed by this little guy's ability to churn out excellent quality prints in a short amount of … Read more