Tech Touch Style

Technology and fashion seem to be going hand in hand these days like bread and butter and Abercrombie and Fitch. One of the sponsors of London Fashion Week (LFW) are Hannspree who donated netbooks for use in the Bloggers Bar. Sony Vaio provided laptops for the media room for Vauxhall Fashion Scout and of course there is the relationship that HP has with the industry ie the Vivienne Tam netbook. After having no access to internet during my stint at LFW (left laptop at home and had no time to blog while rushing from show to show) I couldn't wait to get home and type all my posts up on my HP TouchSmart 300 which is in my office. The PC is a multi touch screen and comes with Windows 7 as well as fantastic a 20 inch full HD display screen. So it is one hell of a beauty. As I am not really too keen on touching the screen (I feel that it is too sacred) it is great that a keyboard and mouse included. The sound from the HP TouchSmart is superb and I tuned into BBC Radio 1Xtra while I was cranking out those LFW posts. There is enough speed to store images and videos which is great for when I am selecting which picture to use for a blog post. It also allows me to retouch and crop images easily which is essential as I have been taking a lot of images at LFW. As my office is right next to the bathroom I tend to indulge in playing my iTunes selection while I am relaxing in the bath. So the HP TouchSmart works well for both work and play.

The picture above is taken from the launch of the HP TouchSmart which I attended back in July (you can read my blog post about it here) where Project Runway finalist Emilio Sosa talked about how he uses the PC to work on his designs.

The Wonders of the HP TouchSmart 300

Last week I was invited to the HP TouchSmart 300 event for bloggers. It was hosted by HP and Edelman and took place at the super swish Paramount in Centre Point in Tottenham Court Road. I was last in Centre Point almost a decade ago when I went there with a mate for a few drinks at the bar. Oh my has the building changed quite a bit since then and it is now very slick indeed. The views from the 31st floor where Paramount is based were simply breathtaking and you could be forgiven for thinking you were in Manhattan. We were served champagne on arrival as well as some tasty snacks. After some mingling with other bloggers such as Miggy from Miggy Loves the Internet, Sophie Eggleton, Anne Marie from What She Wears and Sarah Murphy we were treated to a presentation of the elegant HP TouchSmart 300.

Similar to the iPad the HP TouchSmart is based on touch and aims to make computers personal again with its intuitive features. It possess built for touch applications and is powered with VISION technology from AMD - a company whose sole purpose is to make computers looks pretty. On the HP TouchSmart you can do the usual such as accessing information, entertainment and social network but in a way that is very natural. You can use a variety of touch gestures such as pinching, pressing and dragging to get to where you want. Overall it is a pretty cool product. As well as presentations by reps from HP and AMD we were also treated to a talk by fashion designer, Emilio Sosa who was a runner up in Project Runway. Sosa talked about the creative aspects of the PC and how he uses it to work on his collections - I found this to be really insightful because when I think about PCs I only see Word, PowerPoint and spreadsheets and this presentation showed how creative the HP really is.

After sipping champagne cocktails at the circle bar on the 32nd floor we were taken for a lovely dinner at Rhodes W1 Brasserie at the ultra posh Cumberland Hotel. For those of you who follow my blog will know that I am an Apple lady and apart from a brief daliance with a Dell laptop which ended in tears, I have never really looked at a PC. However, the HP could be easily tempt me away like it did to the execs from Sex and the City who dumped the Apple Mac and defected to HP land for the second movie. In fact it was the HP TouchSmart 600 that Samantha is seen working on in her luxe PR office. With their vibrant campaigns HP are most certainly putting sexy into IT.