HP trying to stand out from the PC crowd (and Apple)

On the first day of HP’s Global Influencer Summit 2012 HP announced over 80 new products, the devices that seemed most interesting to me where the new EVNY Spectre XT Ultrabook and the Pavilion m6 consumer notebook. During the keynote and the breakout sessions I got the impression there was underlying theme that HP have been studying Apple and in some areas trying to emulate Apple by producing stylish products and in some areas differentiate from Apple like having a full set of ports on their Ultrabooks. May times I heard the phrase “you don’t need bag of dongles to use it” which is a dig at the Macbook Air range which only has USB ports. They even brought an Air in to the session complete with the bag of dongles, pointing out that consumers want ports like HDMI and business want network ports and VGA connections. Also pointed out was the IT departments don’t want sealed units like Macs and what to be able to swap out things like batteries and hard drives.

There was also a new marketing term mentioned “Sleekbooks” which is different to Ultrabooks, when I asked what was the difference I was told that Sleekbook is a HP term for their range of consumer notebooks what where thin and light and a signature design but are not Ultrabooks by Intel’s definition, so they could have an optical drive in them or have a spinning drive rather than an SSD and may not even use Intel processors. Whether the name will catch on I am not so sure but they do seem to have seen Apple produce devices people want by being stylish and are trying to make their consumer range attractive. They have even brought back the Hewlett Packard name on the spine of the notebooks.

They are also trying to emphasis that their products are complete solutions by including things like 2 years anti-virus and full versions of Adobe Premier and Photoshop Elements. The Spectre XT and the business Ultrabook the Folio come with a concierge services, which means there is a dedicated help desk number with (they say) trained support people. It was also mentioned that the premium devices don’t come with any trial software which good as we all hate removing all the crapware on a new machine.

One area that hasn’t really been talked about by HP is the tablet market, there where no tablets on show. I didn’t even see the business focused HP Slate, they did say that they are working with Microsoft on a Windows 8 business tablet (the Slate 2) but there was no mention of a consumer Windows tablet. Unsurprisingly there was no mention of the Touchpad!

In fact Windows wasn’t really talked about that much, it was mentioned that the new Notebooks can be upgraded to Windows 8 and that the Pavilion M8’s trackpad supports 4 point touch and a large trackpad designed to work well with Windows 8.

There were lots of other products on show like new Z1 all in one workstation and the POE thin client but for consumers it seems HP are trying to market their notebooks as stylish and desirable, whether they can achieve that is open to debate.

More pictures later.