Hands-on with new HP products

HP is offering a fleet of new products for women, kids, gamers, and business users.

At the CES show in Las Vegas, most companies target one or two consumer categories. HP – a company that’s just as much a corporate monolith as Microsoft or Intel – is ready for them all.

New products include a new widescreen HP Touchsmart DX9000 22-inch with several new tweaks to the touch interface – including picture rotation and new interface options for flicking through photos. Call it the kitchen-user segment. The touch-enabled TX2 notebook is equally impressive with finger-touch controls on a convertible tablet form factor. The DV2, a much lighter and sleek notebook with a metallic sheen, has a Blu-Ray drive and is one of the thinnest notebooks the company has ever released, yet it’s not a netbook for the tween crowd and would appeal to power users. HP has tweens covered as well: in hands-on tests with the Mini 2140, it’s obvious that HP has targeted casual users who do not need to write novels or create engineering plans.

The big news, though, is the new HP MediaSmart EX485 and EX487, which include many new enhancements to Windows Home Server such as a control panel that runs in Windows or Mac. In fact, the product won a best of show at Macworld this week, even though it runs a Windows product.

HP has stylish notebooks designed specifically for women, new gaming desktops and notebook, and an interesting art design program (with help from MTV as a partner) where kids design a notebook print which will be used on an actual model at some point in the future.

Check out our video on the HP IQ800 Series TouchSmart PC