HP Chums CES Waters With New Displays, All-In-One PC

Hewlett Packard on Wednesday unveiled a smattering of new products in advance of next week's Consumer Electronics Show, including desktop PCs, displays and a docking station that doubles as a monitor.

Leading the charge is the Omni 27, an all-in-one PC that HP is positioning as ideal for view digital photos and videos. It features a 27-inch 1080p flat panel display, multi-core processors, an HDMI port and up to two terabytes of storage. HP Magic Canvas software, which allows the desktop to scroll horizontally, is also included.

HP envisions users wanting to edit their digital content, and its HP LinkUp software enables users to plug in a notebook PC and do this on the Omni 27's display. Rounding out the feature set is a mechanism that makes it possible to tilt the display up to 25 degrees.

HP's Omni 27 will go on sale in the U.S. on Jan. 8 and is priced starting at $1,119.

Keenan Thompson, a PC analyst with at Gap Intelligence, a San Diego-based research firm, says all-in-one PCs represent a profitable opportunity for PC makers in an otherwise mature market.

All-in-ones are especially important for HP, which leads the overall global PC market but trails both Apple and Lenovo in this segment, according to Thompson.

"All-in-one PCs are cannibalizing sales of traditional desktops, and HP wants to make sure if it is going to lose sales of tower desktops that it will gain those unit shipments back in the form of AIOs," he said.

Another new PC making its debut at CES is the Pavilion HPE h9 Phoenix, a high end machine that's aimed at gamers and content creators. It can hold up to 16 GB of DDR3 memory and supports discrete graphics cards up to 250W. Customers can also opt for a liquid cooling system that keeps the system running while handling labor intensive workloads.

The Pavilion HPE h9 Phoenix will go on sale in the U.S. on Jan. 8 and is priced starting at $1,149.99.

On the business side, the new HP Compaq L2311c combines a 23-inch monitor with a notebook docking station, allowing mobile users to plug into a larger display while in the office or working from home. It features a high definition LED LCD display and integrated Ethernet and USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports.

The HP Compaq L2311c also comes with a built-in 720p Webcam and HP's Smart AC Technology, which serves as both a notebook power supply and a charging station. It's priced starting at $319 and is expected to be available in February.

Rounding out HP's CES product launch are the LV1911 and LV2011 LED LCD monitors, which measure 18.5 and 20 inches respectively and come with VGA inputs, 3,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio and 5 millisecond response time. The LV2011 is priced at $135 and will be available in February, while the LV1911 is priced at $125 and will be available in March.

This is a much quieter CES for HP than last year's event, when the company unveiled more than a dozen new PCs, notebooks and thin clients. But HP certainly isn’t alone in this regard; Dell is scaling down its CES presence this year, and Sony isn't expected to have any major announcements.

Part of this lack of fanfare has to do with timing -- PC makers are being limited in their announcements by embargoes by Intel and Microsoft, notes Deron Kershaw, a notebook analyst at Gap Intelligence.