HP unveils "Artist Edition" notebook

Someone may need to tell HP that we are a few months out from back to school season (though to be fair, while it's ten months till Australia would be going 'back to school' after the long Christmas break, the US has its "back to school" season in Aug/Sep to coincide with Summer). I guess the massive maker of all things PC wanted do be first to announce back to school gear so it did just that, about ten months early. HP has announced a new laptop called the HP Pavilion dv6z Artist Edition 2.

The artwork you see on the case and wrist rest area is inspired by the sea and sky of Okinawa, Japan. The design won the HP MTV notebook Design Contest in 2008. I for one don’t see much resemblance to the sea or the sky in the artwork, and probably prefer Dell's approach of letting users get whatever design they want printed on their notebook casing, however HP's touch of design on either side of the trackpad adds a certain something.



_{Above: HP dv6z Artist Edition -- do you see the sea?}

The rig starts at $US949 ($AU1200) and can be optioned with a few different AMD CPUs, storage solutions and RAM can go up to 8GB. The notebook also ships with an entertainment software package with Corel Video Studio X2, Painter Sketchpad, and Paint Shop Pro Photo X2. Magix Music Maker 14 is also included with the notebook and it will ship on June 10, though HP Australia says it currently has no plans to release it here.

There is no mention of new or reduced price netbooks for "back to school"; then again, it wasn't so long ago that HP unveiled the Mini 110 and 1101 netbooks.