UMAIR NAEEM EXPERIENCES HP IN BEIJING, CHINA

CIO Pakistan Touches the Future In China!
Amid reports of dwindling sales for HP in desktop and notebook markets, the Touch the Future Now event was held in Beijing, China, towards the end of May 2009.

Throughout, the HP representatives kept the onus on the Future (which they were looking to touch, now!) and kept away from sales trends. Interestingly, when asked about the trends, responses varied from “No comments,” to “I don’t believe that is true”. What the event was about, looked quite exciting, with an interesting line up of initiatives, applications, hardware improvements and new products from HP. CIO Pakistan was there to cover the event, and have a look at what the future is from HP.

The Economical HP Mini!
One of the most simple and arguably the most effective products in the HP line up was the stylish HP Mini 110, available in Black, White Swirl and Pink Chic. With 160 GB of HD space, the Mini 110 offers more than the HP Mini 1000. The reason why this was one of my favorite things on show, was the simplicity of the product. It’s a convenient Mini-Book, in stylish colors and with great features. Most interestingly, it has a starting price of $299, which is brilliant for both corporate consumers, yuppies and the style conscious youth!

Also on show was the HP DV2 notebook, which had won the CES Best Laptop in January at its launch. The version that was being showcased during the event was the dual core version of the HP Pavilion DV2, which offers improved performance versus the single core version. Available in Black and White colors, the price of the DV2 starts from $699, and is aimed at targeting consumers whose core need is entertainment.

All in One PCs and Touch Screen Desktops?!
Yes there were!!

One product that the HP team was particularly proud of was the HP MS200 Pavilion All in Once PC. The sleek package offers an integrated CPU in a 22inch Monitor, starting from $599.

But what happened to be one of the highlights of the show for most of the attendees was a Touch Screen version of the All in One PC. The PC tries to cater for media aficionados, by offering photo, music and video applications. The 22 inch screen is completely touch enabled, and the system runs Windows Vista in the background. CIO Pakistan had a a lot of fun with the touch screen, and you can see that on ciowebstudio.com. The starting price for the system is $1299, and it is certainly worth exploring.

Another HP product that excited me was the 23 inch HP 2309P HD monitor. The monitor is aimed to be customizable as per the requirements of different users with respect to eye level, tilt and swivel by offering complete flexibility. For users in publishing, the pivot feature can be particularly cool, as it can allow you to just swivel your monitor, and presto! The document that you were looking in landscape will become portrait and vice versa. The monitor’s pricing starts from $399.

Sky Room and other Applications
During the event, there were a number of applications that were showcased, and one of them was the Sky Room. The version of the Sky Room that was shown was more of a trial version, and the launch date of the actual application was put in as the second half of the year. The Sky Room has the potential to be quite an interesting collaborative software for technical design firms. The version that CIO Pakistan previewed, allowed face-to-face interaction with up to four people, along with “unmatched application sharing ability,” as Sundara Ramalingam, Product Manager Work Stations put it. The applications shared can be complex data content models, or even rich media content. The underlined theme of this application seems to be its promise of being so much more than just another video conferencing software. The system that HP had chosen to run the application on was the powerful Z800. The system is brilliantly modular, and has a streamlined design to minimize space and enhance performance. A high end configuration of the Z800 would be tentatively around the $2000 mark.

Other announcements revolved around the HP S-Series Pro-Book, which targets SMBs. Behind the regular looking Pro-Book, lie some very interesting add-on applications which are intended to add efficiency to SMB users. One such solution is the File Sanitizer, which is something akin to the office shredder. This application ensures that any file that needs to be completely removed from the system is ‘sanitized’ properly and is not recoverable. The File Sanitizer also allows users to Bleach the system, wherein all data previously deleted can be made un-recoverable. This could have interesting implications for users who regularly get rid of confidential information or revision controlled data.

Another interesting solution built into the Pro-Book is the Quick Look 2. The Quick Look allows a BIOS based “quick look” into Outlook, without booting the machine. This is quite useful, as it has the potential to allow users to access important emails very quickly and efficiently without waiting for the notebook to boot and Outlook to load.  The software actually takes a snapshot of Microsoft Office 2003, and uses the HP BIOS to show the user that information and shut down within 30 seconds.

The system also comes with the HP Spare Key solution, which allows easy recovery of lost system passwords. This is intended to ease the call volume that company IS Help Desks receive about lost passwords.

HP Initiatives!
During the event, HP also announced three key collaborations which it’s embarked on to try to create a positive change in the ecosystem and in particular in Asia Pacific. The first collaboration is regarding Education, while the other two target Energy Efficiency and talking with customers and SMBs rather than to them, hence attempting to facilitate them. With regards to these, HP shared two initiatives. One program run in Asia Pacific is the School Innovation for Education and the second one is HP HELP (HP Entrepreneurship Learning Program).

With regards to the School Innovations program, HP announced 28 grants for 2009, for schools and universities in India, Australia, Japan, China and Singapore. HP intends to supply their products to help in the facilitation of innovation in these schools and universities.

Sadly, countries like Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh remained missing from the program, and it’s something of a short sighted approach from HP as Pakistan has been one country that has looked to embrace technology and would benefit from such programs. When pointed out, Ajay Mohan, the VP Marketing suggested that NGOs in countries should get in touch with HP and apply for the grants. It is hoped that Pakistan’s social welfare set up can take notice and approach HP in these regards.

Grants for the HP HELP program were announced for India, China, Indonesia and Thailand, and is intended to help entrepreneurs develop themselves and create a diffusion of information to those around them.

HP also launched the MAD Widget, which is intended to help initiate on HP’s energy conservation program. The key component in the conservation program is HP’s drive to help educate users to close their PCs after work, and not to leave it on standby till the next day. This can have a huge impact on the environment through energy conservation.

Future is Now?!
All in all, although the initial promise of the event suggested out-of-the-box innovations in terms of design and technology for the upcoming HP products; the actual line up relied more on simplicity and common-sense tweaking of software and hardware to help add value to users. That, of course, is a pretty interesting direction to move on and is an admirable course of action from HP.

The initiatives launched also seemed to be well thought out and headed in the right direction, but countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka were glaringly omitted. HP needs to seriously commit resources to developing markets such as these and help facilitate technology growth for the future.

Although the event was short and sweet, with HP’s innovation in the market the future appears to be user-friendly and rather pleasant!