Inside the Box

How could anyone this time of year not get away with writing on something s/he saw at CES?  I had the opportunity to attend for a few days and while there will be hundreds of columnists over the web putting forth their observations, I wanted to add a couple of my own that will affect us most vividly.

When I went over to the HP booth, the biggest PC related thing I saw was that HP is very heavily touting custom skinning of their notebooks, desktops, and various consumer electronic devices.  It goes along well with HP's current marketing slogan "the PC is personal again."   Other vendors have been doing this for several years, but now that HP is doing this, I think this shows how mainstream this idea has become.  An HP rep told me that customers can upload their own photos and drawings and pricing depends on the size of the item to be skinned, but is as low as $10 for a camera.  She ballparked a notebook at ~$75 – $100.  (I'm sure that includes a nice profit margin as well.)  The quality of the image was pretty good and seemed fairly scratch resistant to my quick test in an inconspicuous corner.  (Done with the rep's okay).

We've done a few custom skinned notebooks in the past for various companies and universities, but this has been always an ad hoc type of project and do not have a formal custom skinning program.  This is in part due to the administration of such a program and because our ID people are afraid of the dillution of the brand that having non-conforming noteooks would wrought.  HP has solve the first problem by outsourcing the entire process to a company called SkinIt, and is currently only offering it on their SB/Consumer lines.  I think we need to offer similar capabilities, but that is probably a topic for my colleague, David Hill to address.

I also got to see Toshiba's new tablet, the Portege R400.  Even though Toshiba touts the tablet as being appropriate for business, I do not see companies jumping for joy over the color scheme.  When you have a glossy finish on a notebook, it tends to scream "consumer," and attracts fingerprints.  There were two features that really impressed me.  The first was Toshiba's "Edge Display" which is a tickertape like display on the outside of the notebook edge that can show email notification, calendar entries, etc.  What is cool is this works even when the computer is in suspend mode.  The Tosh rep said that the system would periodically wake up, update the information needed for the display, and then return back to sleep.

The other thing that impressed me about this box is that Toshiba has solved the issue of the "floppy hinge" on tablet PCs.  Ordinarly tablet PCs have some sort of issue with their swivel hinges being weak and flopping about.  This is one of the key reasons we spent so much time on making our hinge sturdy on the X60 Tablet.  Toshiba has taken a different approach.  The main hinge itself is rather weak, but what the company has done is provide two raised areas on either side of the keyboard.  What happens is when the system is either in tablet or normal mode, additional tabs on the display lock into these areas providing THREE points of contact for an extremely stable display.  I realize this description is not especially clear, so you can see some pictures of what I am talking about here.  I give Toshiba kudos for elegantly solving this problem.

Oh, and one more thing…Ultrawideband docking.  But I'll save that for another day.