HP's rockin' new PCs

Am in New York City for a couple of days at HP's Autumn product launch. Here's a quick synopsis.

THE GOOD
HP's new Touchsmart PC (left): here's a PC that can be controlled by touching the screen. Your finger does pretty much anything a mouse will do. (It also has a keyboard and mouse, though.) It's perfect for kids (can be wiped down with any ordinary household cleaner) while packing in a lot of power into a 19 inch screen.
The new Voodoo Blackbird 002 gaming PC (above, right): very, very impressive. Not only does it pack the maximum firepower, it eschews a lot of propietary hardware in facour of letting the user fit it with his graphics card or hard drive of choice. And it's easy peasy to take it apart and put it back together again. The star of the show, in my view.

THE AVERAGE
Five new iPaq PDAs/smartphones: one's a sat nav device, two are HSDPA-equipped smartphones and two are standard Windows PDAs. Boring! Next!

THE BAD
'The computer is pesonal again' theme: no, it's not. It's still just a laptop or a desktop PC. Nothing on display here would want you to form any deeper of a personal bond with your Ram+hard-drive+Windows machine. Because that's what they are, regardless of a splash of red applied to the side of a keyboard.

Comments

[Drew]

The HP TouchSmart is a great PC, however, far from perfect. I was hoping there would be an upgrade coming for the holiday season, one that would address some of the products limitations, like speed.