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HP Touchsmart featured in Black Eyed Peas video

The Black Eyed Peas recently featured the HP Touchsmart in their latest music video “Boom Boom Pow”. The HP Touchsmart appears three times in the music video – at the very beginning, the end and somewhere in the middle of the video. And not just ANY HP Touchsmart – it’s a HP Touchsmart with a super-sized HP logo!! (and a plus-size screen? Read on for speculation)

Compare that to this closeup taken of a ‘normal’ HP Touchsmart:

Check out the proportions of the logo and it sure makes a huge difference (no pun intended).

There are three plausible explanations:

• HP Touchsmart “product placement edition” with bigger HP logos for appearances in music videos, TV shows and movies
• HP is introducing a slight cosmetic change to normal, retail Touchsmarts this summer (because someone thought the logo was too small)… and the BEP were the first to get their hands on one
• A new HP Touchsmart all-in-one model is coming (See why below)

I put my arm/hand up to my friend’s HP Touchsmart in the same manner as in the video above and my upper arm covers almost 60-70% the length of a 25.5 inch Touchsmart. So it seems the arm/Touchsmart ratio from the Black Eyed Peas video screengrab above is larger than mine – which could either mean body part dimension variations between humans OR that Touchsmart in the video is HUGE (Possibly a 28 or 32 inch model?).

Vaio P netbook – Heaven for pickpockets?

In other news… with the Sony Vaio P already shipping, Sony has been putting that “fits in your pants pocket” concept everywhere, including propping up a mannequin wearing a pair of Levi’s shorts with a Vaio P front plate (means it’s just the lid of the netbook and not as thin as it looks in the picture above) in the back pocket. Sure it’s nice to have a little netbook that you can bring along everywhere and quickly whip out at the coffeeshop to blog a bit, tweet a little and type out some short articles… but that got me thinking as well – is it even PRACTICAL to have a netbook which fits (though not entirely) in terms of width, but sticks half-way out of your pocket?

What do you do when sitting down? How about when you’re walking around? The netbook isn’t exactly so slim that it blends in… and it sticks out half-way too (see the picture above). Well, it gives a whole new definition to the word “Square Pants”, doesn’t it? How about pickpockets? Common sense tells me bringing your expensive netbook out for a walk, in this manner, will make you one of the primary targets of a pickpocket (imagine; shiny overpriced netbook sticking out of the back of someone’s pocket); next to the guy holding two smartphones in his hand strolling without a care in the world to the nearest diner. Intriguing questions and true situations, no?

HP iPAQ Data Messenger Review

I recently got my hands on a retail version of HP’s iPAQ Data Messenger phone (European version).

It’s a nice, simple and stylish looking Pocket PC phone which is a tad smaller than the iPAQ 600 I have. To summarize in one sentence what the HP Data Messenger is all about, it’s actually a slightly smaller iPAQ 600 with a QWERTY keyboard and more fashion sense.

The main features of the HP iPAQ Data Messenger is a 2.8 inch QVGA (320 X 240) touchscreen, a slide-out backlit QWERTY keyboard from the side, with an optical navigation pad and touch sensitive controls on the front, 3 megapixel camera and it runs Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro. There’s also a 2.5 mm headphone jack for making calls/listening to music and micro USB port for charging and connectivity to your computer.

Sure, I do not doubt what people think about the iPAQ Data Messenger – even at the time of its debut, which was around October 2008, it’s specifications already looked dull, dusty and outdated compared to its competitors with similar form factors (that is, devices running WM 6.1 Pro with slide-out QWERTY keyboards). Both the Sony Xperia X1 and HTC Touch Pro offer either larger/higher resolution screens than the HP Data Messenger and come with their own Today Interface, which attempts to cover, what people brand as hideous and clunky, the Windows Mobile UI.

So what’s the point of the HP iPAQ Data Messenger, you ask? Well, it’s mainly targeted at business people who want a straight forward business Pocket PC phone (And we all know Windows and Windows Mobile mean business). It’s not meant to be a flashy or show-off phone with tons of bells and whistles. I find the Sony Xperia X1 a bit on the pricey side (which Sony product isn’t?) while the HTC Touch Pro is the true competitor of the HP Data Messenger and will probably steal quite a few sales thanks to its superior specifications.

However, what’s going for the Data Messenger, versus the Touch Pro 1, is that it has a 2.5 mm headphone jack (I can easily plug in an adapter for 3.5 mm standard headphones) and the fact that I can start out with a fresh phone and install whichever 3rd party Windows Mobile Today Interface that I want. Compared to the new Touch Pro 2 and other new phones released over the past week this month and it’s a different story; those other phones are much more appealing, sadly.

The only way HP can probably fight for now is by lowering the price of the Data Messenger so more people will go for it… and get off their butts NOW to the design room, then hopefully down the road somewhere, release more appealing and competitive iPAQs which are actually able to stand toe-to-toe against the competition!

I love HP (especially their notebooks) but I seriously think they should actually put in some effort into their Pocket PC/smart phone department!

Voodoo (DNA) phone in the works?

Is Voodoo PC working on bringing out their own phone/smartphone? Information right now is very scarce and it still remains a mystery IF there will be a such thing (Since Voodoo PC so far has been strictly a (gaming) computer company). The last time someone brought up the topic of a Voodoo phone would be Rob Enderle in his article published in September 2008. Recently, there have been some little, little things which hint a Voodoo phone again.

Today Mark Soloman made a post entitled “Voodoo Design Secrets” on HP/Voodoo’s The Next Bench blog. Of course, there were no product roadmaps, no concept products, not many revelations at all. Not many revelations. The first picture certainly looks very interesting (see the screenshot above) – it appears to be one of those product design kind of thing in its planning stage where the designers need to list out the components they need to pack into the final product. The right half of the whiteboard writings highlight some very interesting components (to me, at least) such as “speaker holes”, “button finish”, “multicolor LEDs” and of course, a “proximity sensor”.

Why would a computer (desktop or notebook) need a proximity sensor? Who counts the number of speaker holes on their notebook PC and their size? What about “button finish”? All these unanswered questions… the “multicolor LEDs” list “BT” and “W”. Assuming these stand for Bluetooth and WiFi respectively, when was the last time you saw a recent HP… bah, or any modern computer with separate indicators for Bluetooth and WiFi? On the other hand, some old Pocket PCs and HP iPAQs have those kind of LED indicators….

Nah, maybe Voodoo is working on a computer that turns itself on when you approach it (And off, when you walk away from it) which has flush leather buttons and back-to-the-future style separate LED indicators for Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity. Plausible, huh?

HP Mini 2140: Where are the speakers?!!

When I first saw the HP Mini 2140 with the bigger screen, and naturally, reduced bezel around it, I wondered to myself “Just where did the speakers go?”. From the initial press pictures and “virtual demo” on Hewlett Packard’s website, I couldn’t see the speakers in ANY of the press photos at all. And apparently, many of our readers’ enquiring minds wanted to know as well…

Thankfully, a HP Mini 2140 dropped into my hands about an hour after the official announcement and as soon as it did, I inspected the entire netbook for the speakers… just about everything, down to the arrangement of the various connectivity ports, was the same as on the Mini 2133. I lifted the Mini 2140 up (making it activate the 3D Drive Guard HDD protection system) but no speakers underneath either.

Within minutes of posting my hands on with the HP Mini 2140, my Outlook account became swamped with emails from people asking (and demanding to know) “where are the Mini 2140′s speakers?”.

Alright, enough with the suspense, the HP Mini 2140′s speakers are located just below its 10 inch screen – in the gap between the screen and battery so it’s not really visible (See the blue arrow in the picture above). Rest assured, there are TWO speakers (for those who cannot live without stereo sound).

Sound quality of the HP Mini 2140′s speakers were very good – I’ve played some movies and several albums of music on this netbook already. The speakers here are louder than most other netbooks; louder than its predecessor Mini 2133 even! The secret behind this is probably the speaker placement which I just mentioned – which allows the sound to be “bounced” off the battery to the screen to you (this also seems to give the sound more ‘depth’)… or maybe HP just put in better speakers in the Mini 2140.

Something worthy of note is that the HP Mini 2133 and HP Mini 2140 have speakers which are sensibly and strategically place; which aren’t blocked by anything. Most netbooks have their speakers in odd places, like on the underside of the netbook, which tends to muffle sound… yuck.

However, left-right stereo separation on the Mini 2140 is less noticeable compared to the HP Mini 2133 (Whose speakers were placed on the extreme edges of the screen). This shouldn’t be an issue for most people… if you want good and very noticeable stereo separation, you probably should be using headphones anyway, instead of your netbook’s built-in speakers.