HP's big day

The folks at HP seem to be riding high these days--passing archrival Dell as the No. 1 PC retailer, dodging some thorny legal issues, and even being one of TV madman Jim Cramer's favorite stock picks. The company is working its new mojo by unleashing a torrent of new products today, some of which were highlighted this evening at a press event in New York.

The biggest news was the first product to spring from the HP/Voodoo team-up, the HP Blackbird. This impressive-looking gaming PC sits on a single giant foot and includes pretty much every high-end component imaginable. It's the perfect system for rocking out new DX10 games such as Crysis and BioShock, as long as you've got several thousand spare greenbacks lying around. Check out Rich's full review for all the gory details. Somewhat less interesting was more traditional desktop, the HP Elite m9040n.

Today also marks the return of the iPaq handheld. The new models, including the iPaq 110 and iPaq 210 aim to bring the PDA category back from the dead, having been sent to an early grave by ubiquitous smart phones.

More full-featured are the iPaq 610 and iPaq 910, which have full QWERTY keyboards and Wi-Fi. Bonnie's got full details on those, plus the iPaq 310 Travel Companion, a GPS device with a 4.3-inch, 480x800 touch screen.

We also got a glimpse at a couple of new HP laptops aimed at the business set. The HP Compaq 6820s and 6720s are fairly basic biz laptops, with standard Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs (cheapskates can dial down to a Celeron processor, but we wouldn't recommend it). The interesting part is that the 6820s is a 17-inch model--rare for the business laptop scene. In addition, HP's professional and mobile workstation series models--the HP Compaq 2710p, 2510p, and 6910p, and the HP Compaq 8000 series--will offer 64GB solid-state drive options. Check out Michelle's post for details.

Lest you think HP has been hoarding its goods for months to roll everything out in a single day, we've already seen a veritable "hailstorm of printers" as Felisa puts it, unveiled last week.