The HP Blogger Meet – Karachi

Sunday , 13^th Dec ’09 , a couple of days after Dine up With Dell , HP also organized their very own Blogger meet under the banner of HP Mobility , where else Dell’s event was arranged on the fly at 48 hours notice HP had given ample time and the event was announced a week in advance anf before Karachi similar events were held in Islamabad and Lahore .

The event organizer was Emagine lead by Mr Khalid , a fellow Wolverine ( University of Michigan Grad ) and he was also the main moderator .

The time to start the event was 4 pm and the event started almost on time , Kudos to HP on that . Khalid at first introduced he panelists , Imran of ithinkdiff.com , Jadoon of programmerfish.com and the chap from redmondpie.com

Imran at first introduced himself and his fellow panelists and moved on telling us about his experiences with the HP Netbook 110 which he was given to review on a positive note

After Imran , Khalid took over and informed us of that HP is taking bloggers as the upcoming and highly credible source of information and want us to go through their products , write about them and also inform HP about what changes we would like to have on their machines , which HP will later incorporate in their future models .

Imran started with what we as a blogger / tech enthusiast want in a Mini / HP laptop , Jadoon started with use of Windows Live and wanted HP to incorporate a blogging tool on their QuickWeb splash screen , next came I , for the device Is asked for easier access to the RAM and Hard Disk as I have a HP 2140 netbook and to upgrade RAM I had to rip off the keyboard , Khalid told me that it’s taken care of and HP Mini 110 has the access from cover at the bottom . I also asked for a better screen resolution on which he told us about the one with Nivida Ion capable of HD graphics , and I also wished for a SIM Card and GPS builtin in netbook . Khalid agreed to all as being relevant and upcoming models to have some features .

Here the mess begins , the talks shifted from HP 110 Mini to HP 310 with Nivida Ion , Khalid himself was signing praises of the machine and according to him for only Rs 3000 extra we can get it over HP Mini 110 , now everyone was happy that HP is finally giving out a performance power house at a lower price and Khalid even said that we can order it online from HP.com ( we can’t ) .

As the discussion was steering more towards HP 310 , the guy from HP came on the front , taking no names let’s call him the Mr Green ( as per the color of his shirt and the shade on his face later in the discussion )

The firs thing , Mr G said HP 310 is not for you  , it’s very expensive and not meant for us – Duh! Buddy the people sitting in front of you have better machines , have the purchasing power and you are telling us it’s not for us . When it was asked to inform us of the price , he refused , that he is not authorized to quote the price of 310 , we asked him the dollar price and he even refused that and someone went online on their phone and informed us of the price being only $400 for standard configuration .

Faisal Kapadia of www.deadpanthoughts .com asked about HP vs Acer as he is using a Acer Netbook and it’s lower in price on that Mr G said it’s like comparing a Ferrari with a Toyota on which Faisal answered buddy Acer has a Ferrari , HP don’t and that’s where he turned green , too tough of a crowd for him.

The poor chap left after some more hard talk and Khalid came back controlling the event and talking about HP technology and all but by than the discussion had gone to a sour note and after a while Khalid had to go for Tea Break.

The discussion during Tea Break had been the attitude of the Green Guy , with people bashing HP and lack of information , seemed like Khalid was giving a good tongue lashing to MR Green in one corner but I’m not sure of it , I walked around met all the friends , the food was good , touched and played with the HP Mini 110 ( it was same as my HP 2140 ) . I even asked the Mr Green about the difference between 2140 and Mini 110 and he was like 2140 is commercial netbook and Mini 110 is consumer when I asked the difference , he repeated himself , when I asked him does it mean 2140 is more powerful than 110 , he was like no it’s commercial ,I had enough of it so turned and left .

Khalid also discussed about giving away the review units and was of the opinion that it’s better to show up at a brand partner and checkout and review the unit there for a couple of hours

The session resumed with Imran giving a Demo of the HP 110 running Win XP , Imran showed us some videos and took us around the machine , he also covered HP QuickSync , their cloud based storage but not in much detail as I’ve desired .

Than came the demo of HP QuickWeb , their SplashScreen OS based on Linux so without booting up the machine , the user can have access to multimedia files and net based services within seconds of turning on the computer but alas , the machine crashed thrice and people started loosing interest and the program ended .

My advice to HP and Emagine is , don’t loose hope , bloggers are a tough bunch and you needed to be calm and composed with us , the Green guy with his attitude messed the whole thing with one of the participants even saying that he’ll never buy a machine if Mr G is selling it to him , people don’t want to be told what to buy , we want our choices . The way Dell handled the event was that they sold us the concept not the machines , once the concept gets sold machines sell automatically . I understand the frustration of Mr G , he wanted us to buy Mini 110 and when the discussion got swayed towards 310 , he thought he’s going to loose his market , hey he’s spending money on us and wanted to see some ROI and with everything going downhill , he had to get itchy but there are ways to handle the situation and sway the discussion to 110 . Another suggestion is at the event  , HP had 4 machines but demo was being on only one which crashed thrice i.e 300 % Fail , if all 4 machines had been demoed and only one crashed it would have been only 25 % Fail

HP do not give up on us , but next time have some patience and bring someone more knowledgeable from HP .