Posted 03/12/10 at 07:39:53 AM by Paul Lilly

In this week's edition of Extreme Tech Makeover, Hewlett Packard will spend $40 million overhauling its image. Helping them do that is rapper Dr. Dre, who will appear in one of the new ad spots.

"Most people think we are just a printer company," says Michael Mendenhall, HP's chief marketing officer. "Awareness of what we do has not kept pace with [our] expansion."

That expansion includes scooping up companies like Electronic Data Systems and 3Com, and to help push the message that HP is a multi-talented company, the $40 million "Let's Do Amazing" ad campaign will feature several different celebrities. In the one starring Dr. Dre, the rapper talks about how HP rebuilt his PC to make his music sound better. Ad spots like this will help give the company what it lacks, which is "a real differentiation in personality and distinction."

Look for the commercials during high-traffic broadcasts, including the NCAA March Madness championship and series finales of shows like "24."

Read More

Posted 03/10/10 at 08:56:02 AM by Paul Lilly

HP could soon find itself in court, as over 100 Chinese consumers are none too happy with what they claim are faulty laptops, a lawyer for the group said this week.

According to Reuters, Jiang Suhua, a lawyer at Yingke Law Firm in Bejing, claims the problems have to do with overheating videocards ultimately causing the laptops to malfunction. Suhua said there are about 170 complaints so far for a problem that apparently dates back to 2007.

"Yes, we can bring it to court, but right now it has not reached that state," Suhua said.

HP says it had a program in November 2007 to offer a free repair to anyone with an affected laptop, but the OEM stopped short of commenting on this specific complaint.

Read More

Posted 03/10/10 at 07:25:24 AM by Paul Lilly

In the highly competitive enterprise storage sector, IBM this week had reason to celebrate, saying it achieved the highest growth among the top three storage vendors.

According to a market share report by IDC, IBM's external disk storage systems revenue grew by 9 percent year-over-year during the fourth quarter of 2009, putting the company's growth rate well ahead of the competition. By contrast, EMC stayed relatively flat with a 0.7 percent decline, while Hewlett Packard's revenue took a backwards slide to the tune of 7.3 percent during the same quarter.

Big Blue also noted gains in the Windows and Linux OS segments in 2009, boasting a 24 percent increase in Linux storage. What makes this particularly noteworthy is that the overall Linux storage market was down 4 percent.

Read More

Posted 03/08/10 at 02:51:12 PM by Bart Salisbury

The HP Slate’s resemblance to Apple’s iPad looks to be no more than skin deep. Sure, the two devices do basically do the same thing, but Slate looks to offer a bit more potential, if the HP/Abode promotional videos are to believed, with Windows 7 and Flash support.

The tiff between Apple and Adobe raises some key concern about the quality of the Flash application. Sure, it drives a lot of content on the web, but at what cost to hardware? One, it appears, Apple doesn’t want to bear (and thus has hitched it’s wagon to HTML5). Adobe, understandably, doesn’t want to give up its content delivery hegemony on the Internet. Touting the amount of Flash content on the web, and demonstrating it can be used, and used without troublesome hardware consequences, is a good move to negate any bad public relations emerging from Apple’s very public stance.

Adobe may be stacking the deck in its presentation, however. According to Engadget, “Flash is said to be hardware-accelerated on the Slate, which suggests something other than a bone-stock Atom setup in there--we'd guess it's an Atom plus a Broadcom Crystal HD Accelerator”. How much of an impact this has is open to discussion, but it suggests that non-accelerated versions may move slower. Could Adobe’s approach later backfire, when users of other tablet devices don’t get this promised level of performance?

How well Apple’s Flash strategy plays out will be known shortly--if the iPad not just sells, but satisfies, then Apple made the right bet (for its customer base). We’ll have to wait and see later this year, when it is expected HP will release the Slate, whether Flash means all that much to consumers.

Read More

Posted 03/04/10 at 11:53:07 AM by Loyd Case

Most all-in-one PCs make extensive use of notebook technologies: The processors are low voltage, the GPUs are mobile designs, and the optical drives are low profile. This tends to endow all-in-ones with a natural price premium, because compact, lower-power components add cost. Be that as it may, the $700 HP Pro All-in-One seems a tad overpriced—particularly when you consider that the nearly identical home version, the Pavilion MS200, costs $100 less.

We don’t think this boost is entirely an attempt to gouge corporate buyers, though. For one thing, the Pro All-in-One ships with the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Professional, which adds domain networking, Windows XP mode—a virtualized PC running Windows XP—and network-backup capability.

The MS218 consists of a monitor (with all the workings of a PC built into the same enclosure), a keyboard, a mouse, and a 120-watt external power brick. Although efficient (the entire PC draws just 36 watts at idle), the brick seems to be overkill. Even when running system-intensive tasks, we never saw power consumption rise above 66 watts.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

Read More

Posted 03/02/10 at 07:06:17 AM by Paul Lilly

Acer has never been shy about sharing its goals with the public. On more than one occasion, company chairman J.T. Wang has expressed lofty expectations for his company, including a desire to become the No. 1 notebook supplier by 2011 and the biggest PC vendor of them all in 2012. Standing in its way of both goals is HP, so what's the fastest way to surpass the competition?

According to some market watchers, scooping up Fujitsu would make the most sense. Acer needs to see more than 40 percent on-year growth in 2010 to start to achieve its goals, and it's fairly unlikely that will happen with some major maneuvering.

Acer shipped some 32 million notebooks in 2009, up 32 percent on-year and enough to claim 18 percent of the market. HP, meanwhile, shipped 37 million units.

Acquiring Fujitsu, says market watchers, would not only give Acer the boost it needs to become No. 1, but it's also the most likely target since Fujitsu has a strong sales presence in both Western Europe and Japan.

Read More

Posted 03/01/10 at 12:28:15 PM by Loyd Case

Featuring a microATX motherboard the HP Compaq 6005 Small Form Factor PC is relatively svelte, measuring 13.3 inches by 14.90 inches square and less than four inches tall. (Note: HP also sells the model 6005 in a micro-tower configuration).

Built around a motherboard with an AMD 785G chipset, the system sports a 3GHz AMD B95 CPU. The “95” in B95 denotes a thermal design power (TDP) of 95W, while the “B” means “business.” These business-class CPUs are identical to their 45nm retail cousins and offer 2MB of L2 cache (512KB dedicated per core) and 6MB of shared L3 cache.

As with many business desktop PCs, this system uses integrated graphics; in this case, the ATI Radeon HD 3200 core built into the 785G. It won’t win any gaming benchmarks, but it should handle most light-duty business 3D chores, including running Windows 7’s Aero mode.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

Read More

Posted 02/26/10 at 01:01:40 PM by Todd Haselton

HP touts the $900 ProBook 5310m as being the world's thinnest full-performance notebook, but its slim form factor doesn't mean limited functionality. The 5310m ultra-portable is burly enough to satisfy demanding business users, and it boasts a price tag that won't blow out your IT department's budget.

The 5310m, which is just .93 inches thick, was built specifically for small- to medium-sized businesses, but it breaks the mold of the blandly colored, chunky business notebooks your employees are probably accustomed to. This HP features a beautiful, black, anodized, brushed-aluminum finish with glossy black accents, augmented by a magnesium base for additional protection. It’s outfitted with a spacious, spill-resistant keyboard that remains comfortable even after entended typing sessions. The multi-touch trackpad offered a little too much resistance to our finger swipes and gestures, but this is far from being a a deal breaker.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

Read More