envy

Ludicrously priced laptops: Apple, HP, Sony

Some laptops, especially ultraportables, brazenly push the envelope on pricing. In the age of the ultra-cheap Netbook, are they really worth the $2,000 to $3,000 price tag? I've listed three egregious offenders and two that fall into the less-scandalous-but-still-snooty pricing category.

Let's start with the Hewlett-Packard Voodoo Envy 133, probably the most brazenly overpriced of the batch because it will still set you back as much as $2,700 despite the fact that it hasn't been updated in almost eight months and, accordingly, comes with obsolete hardware.

The 13-inch ultra-slim Voodoo Envy 133 model NV4050NA … Read more

HP: Voodoo lives on, but 'not immune' to layoffs

Amid reports of layoffs at Hewlett-Packard's Voodoo PC subsidiary, the company has decided to be slightly more clear about what exactly is going on--emphasis on "slightly."

Phil McKinney, an HP vice president and CTO of the Personal Systems Group, under which the Voodoo brand falls, weighed in on the official Voodoo blog Wednesday. The Voodoo brand is currently being integrated with the company's larger consumer PC line, which means that things at the little niche PC outfit from Calgary, Alberta, are also changing.

"Voodoo's limited size and focus on North America had limited its … Read more

HP says Voodoo Envy 133 now shipping, hints at new product

Hewlett-Packard said Tuesday that the Voodoo Envy 133 laptop introduced in June, is now finally shipping to customers.

It's HP's version of the Lenovo X300 or the MacBook Air: incredibly thin and pretty to look at. It was introduced as part of an elaborate product rollout at a high-profile event in Germany.

The Envy is a good example of the kind of design chops and credibility Voodoo brings to HP. When HP bought Voodoo a few years back, the enthusiast PC maker became HP's gaming PC unit, which made sense, especially after Dell bought Alienware.

But soon … Read more

HP brings Voodoo into the consumer PC fold

The world's largest PC maker has decided it doesn't need a separate gaming PC unit anymore. From now on, Voodoo will be just one of Hewlett-Packard's consumer PC brands.

Voodoo founder Rahul Sood said on his personal blog that this was "always" the intention when HP bought Voodoo PC in 2006, and "the plan is now being accelerated, ultimately making it a reality sooner than any of us ever imagined."

Sood repeats that this is a "good thing" for the Voodoo brand, and he's probably right. HP knows how to move PCs, … Read more

HP Voodoo silicon mimics MacBook Air, ThinkPad

Notice any similarities between the Hewlett-Packard Voodoo Envy and its thin rivals, the Apple MacBook Air or ThinkPad X300? Yes, they're all very thin. But look inside and you'll see more common features.

To deliver reasonable processing power at low power the Voodoo Envy opted for the same special low-power processors used in the Air: the Intel SP7700 and SP7500.

You won't find these processors listed on Intel's processor pricing page. They were designed originally for the MacBook Air and use a special 22mm x 22mm package and have a thermal envelope of only 20 watts … Read more

HP/Voodoo takes on MacBook with 13-inch Envy laptop

We've previously taken notice of Voodoo founder (and current chief technology officer of HP's Global Gaming Business) Rahul Sood's playful birthday video, where he cut a cake with a MacBook Air and said, "Well, I wouldn't be needing this notebook for long anyways." Now we know exactly what he was talking about, with the new announcement of the Voodoo Envy 133.

We actually got to take a peek at one of these in person a few weeks ago, and we were impressed with the slim, attractive design. At around 3.4 pounds, it falls … Read more

'The world's largest TV': 205 inches

How quickly things change. Just a couple of months ago, the likes of Sharp and LG were vying for bragging rights over the largest TVs at the CES show in Las Vegas, with sets around 108 and 102 inches. Now, Italy's Tecnovision has dwarfed those models with what it's understandably billing as "the world's largest television" on display at CeBIT in Germany, a 205-inch HDTV--practically big enough, Tech Digest says, to fill an entire wall. There's no information on specs or pricing, but we suspect that its name alone, "Luxio," is … Read more

Crave to Panasonic: Bring on the new laptops

Those lucky Japanese. They get the latest in shiny, lightweight laptops, while we here in the States have to wait for the new models to jump to our shores. The most recent example: blogs in Japan, spotted by the folks at Engadget, reported an ultraportable addition to Panasonic's Let's Note line of laptops (known in our neck of the woods as ToughBooks). The compact, two-pound Let's Note R6 features a 10.4-inch XGA display and will pack in a 1.06GHz Intel Core Duo U2400 processor, up to 1.5GB of RAM, and up to 120GB of … Read more

Samsung goes nuts with 30-inch LCD

How big will flat-panel computer screens get? The sky's the limit, if the likes of Samsung have anything to say about it. The Korean manufacturer just joined Dell, Apple and others in introducing a 30 -inch monitor. (Model CX305T, for those keeping score.) Akihabara News gives the granular details: "a 2,560-by-1,600 resolution, a 1000:1 ratio for contrast, a 400cd/m2 brightness, and a 6ms response time." But what we care about is the price--about $1,657, by our calculation. Which means we'll be content to squint at our 19-incher for the time being.… Read more