Posted 10/30/09 at 09:46:29 AM by Paul Lilly

We've been talking a lot about Acer lately, and that's because Acer has been doing a lot of talking of its own. The OEM's been pounding its chest like Kevin Garnett after an 'and-one' and talking smack to Dell, HP, and anyone else who stands in its way. And now the OEM is saying it's fully prepared to take on HP in a bit of a pricing war, which comes just a day after Acer said it feels confident it will ship 40 million notebooks in 2010.

According to news and rumor site DigiTimes, HP has already kicked off some pretty fierce price competition in a few designated markets, which includes sub-$300 models in the U.S. Acer's ever talkative chairman JT Wang said his company will not only follow suit, but plans to one-up HP by aggressively marketing its netbook and ultra-thin segments, both of which are areas HP is a little weaker in.

Beyond 2010, Wang said the global netbook market is on track to reach 350 million units, and we're a bit surprised Acer didn't say it plans to capture 349 million of them.

Let the price wars begin.

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Posted 10/30/09 at 08:03:47 AM by Paul Lilly

According to IBM, some 235 former Sun and HP customers moved their critical business workloads to IBM servers and storage systems in the third quarter. And in the past three years since IBM first established its Migration Factory program specifically for this purpose, Big Blue has been able to convince nearly 2,000 customers to make the switch, most of which have come from rivals Sun and HP.

Perhaps weary of what the future holds once Oracle's acquisition of Sun is complete, 84 Sun clients made the move to IBM Power Systems in the third quarter alone. According to IBM, it's the company's long-term investments in systems and consistent roadmaps that have been the biggest draws.

Speaking of Power Systems, IBM gained five share points in the third quarter, which is the sixth consecutive quarter of share gains. System x systems gained two points, while IBM storage went up an unspecified amount in the third quarter.

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Posted 10/22/09 at 01:22:46 PM by Paul Lilly

With a lot of help from the University of Michigan, Hewlett Packard on Wednesday unveiled its beta BookPrep project, which seeks to make more than half a million rare books available through a print-on-demand system.

Using imaging and printing technology from HP Labs, HP is able to automatically scan rare books and then clean up, brighten, and align the text. As of this writing, there are exactly 472,509 books available for purchase, most of which were published before 1923.

"HP BookPrep technology allows publishers to extend the life cycle of their books, removes the cost and waste burdens of maintaining inventory, and uses a full spectrum of technologies to deliver convenient access to consumers," said Andrew Bolwell, HP's director of New Business Initiatives.

In addition to rare books, HP said it is also extending its BookPrep project to publishers and content owners who want to offer their full catalogs of titles online, The Inquirer reports.

BookPrep Link

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Posted 10/22/09 at 08:24:21 AM by :Paul Lilly

Almost as a side note, HP today announced its new Compaq L2105tm touchscreen monitor, dedicating just a few lines to promoting the display in a press release which covered several items.

The 21.5-inch, 1080p display sports a multitouch panel with one finger scrolling and two finger mousing capabilities.. But if you prefer to roll with a stylus, you'll find one jammed conveniently into the side of the monitor. You can even use a gloved finger, says DisplayBlog.com, who points out that the two cameras, infrared light, sensor, and reflective film create a rugged light field capable of detecting just about any type of object.

There was a little bit of marketing glitz on HP's part. According to the OEM, this is the world's first Windows 7 certified monitor, which you means you can plug it in groove to your newly acquired copy of the just-released OS.

HP says the L2105tm is available now for $299.

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Posted 09/08/09 at 08:21:31 AM by Paul Lilly

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but so what, they have 9 lives anyway. And because of some curious folks who did some digging on HP's website, we now know what the OEM has in store for its fall notebook lineup, and it starts with a Core i7 laptop.

Dubbed the dv8, HP's 18.4-inch desktop replacement will be one of the first portable PCs to use Intel's mobile Core i7 processor (we've seen Core i7 notebooks before, but none that have used the mobile variant). The quad-core chip will come clocked at 1.6GHz and be able to scale up to 2.8GHz when ramping down one or more cores. It's also likely the system will ship with a 4GB of RAM, 640GB of storage, and a Blu-ray drive.

On the other end of the mobile spectrum, HP will also launch a pair of CULV-based notebooks in the form of the 11.6-inch Pavilion dm1 and 13.3-inch dm3. The former will sport 2GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive, while the latter beefs things up with 4GB of memory and a 500GB hard drive.

Other upcoming models include an updated Voodoo Envy 15 and an Ion-based Compaq Mini 311c.

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Posted 08/07/09 at 04:30:10 PM by Paul Lilly

Nvidia on Tuesday announced that Hewlett Packard's flagship Z800 workstation computer is configurable with up to two Nvidia Tesla GPUs.

"The adoption of Tesla GPUs is the fastest of any new processor technology in the history of HPC," said Andy Keane, general manager of Tesla business at Nvidia. "We are delighted to see a leader such as HP begin to ship Tesla GPU-enabled systems into the market and to help accelerate the work of their customers."

Nvidia's Tesla GPUs differ from standard graphics chips in that Tesla is built using the company's massively parallel CUDA architecture, featuring 240 cores per processor. Tesla-based hardware solutions are designed for CAD/CAM,CE, computational finance, computational fluid dynamics, geographic information services, imaging, life sciences, and other high performance tasks.

In addition to up to two Tesla GPUs, HP's Z800 comes configurable with an Intel Xeon 5500 quad-core processor, Intel 5520 chipset, 4MB or 8MB of processor cache, and up to 192GB of DDR3-1333 memory.

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Posted 07/01/09 at 08:00:00 PM by Michael Brown

We’re unabashed fans of HP’s Touch-Smart desktop machines, so we were really looking forward to getting our digits on the new technology in a convertible touch-screen notebook PC. But our eager anticipation only made the reality of the TouchSmart tx2 all that more disappointing.

This is the first convertible touch-screen PC designed for the consumer market, and its underlying hardware—which in our review unit included AMD’s best mobile CPU—delivered enough horsepower for this machine’s touch-screen elements. Benchmark performance, on the other hand, was dismal (more on that later).
 
You can use the TouchSmart tx2 as a conventional notebook PC or rotate its 12.1-inch screen 180 degrees, lay it flat, and use the machine’s tablet functionality. The 1280x800 touch screen uses active digitizing technology and supports the use of either a fingertip or a digital pen (as opposed to the simple stylus that HP shipped with its first-generation TouchSmart desktops). The digital pen delivers hover feedback (it doesn’t have to touch the screen to activate user-interface elements, such as tooltips) and considerably more precision than a fingertip.

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Posted 06/16/09 at 09:43:06 AM by Paul Lilly

Citing those ever-elusive "market sources," news and rumor site DigiTimes says 3D notebook displays are just around the corner. More specifically, Chi Mei Optoelectronics (CMO) just finished developing an 18.4-inch 3D notebook display, which will ultimately end up in the hands of Hewlett Packard.

According to DigiTimes' sources, HP plans on releasing notebooks using the 3D panel sometime in the second half of 2009, perhaps as early as next month. In addition to 3D capabilities, the panels will also boast full HD resolution and a 120Hz frame rate.

The sources also added that CMO is churning out ultra-thin displays for use on 11.6-, 14-, and 15.6-inch CULV notebooks, though it's unclear whether these will also feature 3D capabilities.

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