The Dragon - and Centrino Pro

HP proudly launched one of its latest "laptops" at the event in Shanghai, dubbed "The Dragon". The term laptop has to be used advisedly here: this machine weighs in at 15 pounds and has a 20-inch acreen, and no one is going to be carrying this monster round. HP is positioning it as a desktop replacement - a moveable home entertainment system. But it's unlikely anyone will be running it off battery power or taking it on long-haul flights. The Dragon, also known as the HP Pavilion HDX, runs on Intel's new Centrino Pro (Santa Rosa) technology that also includes the draft specification for the 802.11n WiFi standard.

Apparently the "Santa Rosa" codename for the latest generation of the Centrino technology will be branded Centrino Pro for businesses and Centrino Duo for consumers. Centrino Pro will also include Active Management Technology (AMT) that enables IT staff to take control of a problem notebook, even when the PC's Windows operating system is down.

At this week's event in Shanghai Intel's head of marketing Sean Maloney said he expects WiMAX technology to be included in chipsets in 1-2 years.

Chinese walls

Incredibly slow Internet access made life a lot more difficult for journalists needing to post stories while in China. All journalists at the event in Shanghai have commented on it and most have attributed it to the firewall that data has to go through. It's also been noted that some Web sites just aren't accessible from here - forget looking up anything on Wikipedia, for example! Interestingly, you can access conversapedia.com - the self-proclaimed "encyclopedia you can trust". Freedom of information is still a major issue here.

Some journalists, even though specially invited by HP for this event, were simply unable to get visas to come. We all had to submit forms with details of professional equipment, and some journalists were met at the airport and had their equipment confiscated - all this is of course was heard on the ground here at the HP event.

China's still got a long way to go on many levels, that much is clear.

It's a long way to go to Shanghai....

...especially to be stood up by a BT executive!

Yes, here I am in Shanghai, venue for this year's Hewlett-Packard mobility summit. It's certainly a sign of how things are changing across the industry when HP starts getting more of the pure telecoms press involved in their major events. But it's interesting also that a lot of their presentations deal with the very basics of telecoms ("has everyone here heard of 3G?" I just heard one executive ask.) The presentation by the BT guy (I'll mention no names) was also extremely basic ("in the UK we have a service called Fusion").

Well, of course not everyone that follows HP's fortunes is also going to know a lot about telecoms and service providers. The PC manufacturer certainly launched a few products today - notebook computers supporting the draft 802.11n WiFi standard as well as existing WiFi standards. Six of the seven business notebooks presented (four of which yet to ship) at the event also had added capability for 3G broadband including both cdma2000 and UMTS. Overall the company unveiled 13 new notebooks models.

There were no new wireless iPaq launches, just more on the iPaq 510 that was already launched at 3GSM and supports UMA and also has a SIP client for business users. BT has already committed to offering that with Business Fusion.

The overall message is that HP wants to increase its mobility offering and it wants to play a role in FMC.