Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

I was just about to crawl into bed, but HP's PR people sent me a press release with gobs of new products, and so I forsake sleep to deliver the news to you, the good readers of Digital Home Thoughts. :-) I just love it when these companies release products late at night...and my wife really appreciates it as well. Hah!

That sexy looking beast above is the HP HDX18: a brand new Centrino 2-based notebook that has some seriously sweet features. It boasts a 16:9 aspect ratio 18.4 inch screen at 1920 x 1080 resolution, driven by an NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT with 512 MB of RAM. There's 4 GB of DDR2 system RAM, two 250 GB 5400 RPM hard drives (really? not 7200 RPM?) for a total of 500 GB of storage, a LightScribe super-multi DVD burner, Bluetooth 2.0, and Intel 802.11 a/g/n WiFi. It also has an HDMI port, a "triple bass sub-woofer", an eSATA port, gigabit Ethernet, a 5 in 1 media card reader, an ExpressCard 54 slot, a 4-pin Firewire connection, and at the heart of it all is an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU running at 2.26 Ghz with 3 MB of cache, and 64-bit Windows Vista Home Premium SP1. It weighs in at a hefty 8.9 pounds, and has an 8-cell battery. The full specs are in this PDF file.

The smaller brother of the HDX18, above we have the HDX16. It's very similar in overall design to its big brother, but smaller: it has a 16" screen, also in 16:9 aspect ratio, and the resolution is 1366 x 768. The same NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT drives the screen, so if you're into gaming, you'll get better frame rates from this lower-resolution screen. The HDX16 has a single hard drive, 320 GB in size, but still boasts 4 GB of RAM, the same CPU, same wireless features, same DVD drive, etc. It has a smaller 6-cell battery instead of the 8-cell battery in the HDX18. The full specs are in this PDF file.

The full press release is after the break, along with more images I've interwoven into the release. It's a bit late for me to summerize all the new products, but the most noteworthy beyond these two laptops is probably the HP TouchSmart IQ816 (pictured above). It has a massive 25.5 inch screen running at 1920 x 1200 resolution, powered by an NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GS HD CPU with 512 MB RAM. The CPU is an Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 running at 2.10 Ghz, and there's 4 GB of RAM and a 750 GB 7200 RPM hard drive to round out the offering. The usual gigabit Ethernet, 802.1 b/g/n WiFi, webcam, NTSC tuner (with OTA HD), and built-in microphone are included. The full specs are in this PDF file. Read more...