New York – Hewlett-Packard introduced a slew of new products at the Digital Life technology show here Oct. 14, including a slimline PC series, upgrades to the company’s Digital Entertainment Centers and a low-priced desktop replacement notebook.
The entry-level Pavilion 7210n and 7220n slim line computers are geared toward students and consumers with space constraints. Each is about one-third the size of a typical PC tower and runs on an Intel Celeron M 1.4GHz or 1.5GHz processors. These feature 160GB or 200GB hard drives, 512MB of memory and dual format, double layer DVD burners. The units are shipping this week with suggested retail prices of $449 and $519, after $50 mail-in rebate.
On the notebook side the company rolled out the dv8000. This is a multimedia oriented unit with a 17W-inch display and, in a first for HP, replaces the standard desktop processor with a mobile chip, and AMD 64-bit Turion. Kevin Wentzel, HP’s notebook product manager, said this switch allowed the unit to be thinner and lighter then previous desktop replacement models.
Other features include a 240GB hard drive and a slot for a second optional drive, 1GB of memory and a variety of DVD and CD burners. It will ship at the end of October with a $849 suggested retail price.
HP made several major upgrades to its Digital Entertainment Center products and chopped $500 off the price points held by the previous models. The z556 and z558, started shipping this week with suggested retail prices of $1,499 and $1,599, respectively. Each uses the newest edition of Microsoft’s Media Center operating system, contain one HD and two NTSC TV tuners, a DVD Multi drive (adding DVD-RAM capability) and an instant on/off capability so it can mimic a TV. There is no longer a shut down or boot up period, instead the unit goes into what can best be described as a deep sleep mode. In this mode it can still be accessed by other computers on the network and instantly wake up in order to record programming.
The z558 has a 300GB hard drive, while the z556 offers 240GB.
