The Hindu : Take your pick: fun or functional PC

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jun 13, 2003

Business

Business

Take your pick: fun or functional PC

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE JUNE 12 . Hewlett Packard has doubled its home PC lines for the Indian market leaving customers with a choice between a `fun' thing and a functional tool. The nationwide launch today of a new series of Pavilion PCs, will in some cases create competition with its own Presario line, the legacy of last year's `marriage' with Compaq.

However, HP has a clearly segmented gameplan: Speaking on the telephone from Delhi, HP India's Vice President for the Personal Systems Group, Ravi Swaminathan, told The Hindu that the new Pavilion Home PC would target those looking for a lifestyle product: optimised to view movies on CD or DVDs, and to capture and share digital pictures and video. The existing Compaq Presario models while featuring CD and DVD drives and hi-fi speakers would appeal to those who would sacrifice a little "pizzazz'' for productivity.

There is also a perceptible price factor to separate the two series: The Presario's will mostly address the market for multimedia PCs in the Rs. 30,000-Rs 50,000 range. The three Pavilion PCs launched today — the t220i, t230i and t250i — are priced at Rs. 42,000, Rs. 59,000 and Rs. 79,000. The cheapest Pavilion is based on a Pentium 4 chip clocking 1.9 GHZ, while the two pricier models are faster at 2.4 GHz. The entry Pavilion sports a CD ROM drive, while the better models have combo CD/DVD or DVD read/write drives. The RAM memory is uniformly 256 MB and the hard drive is 40 GB with the t220i and 80 GB with the other two models. The costlier models also come with a TV tuner card.

However some existing Presarios, announced as recently as April this year, go up to Rs. 1 lakh or more in India and there is an obvious overlap. While the Pavilions became available today at 125 premium outlets nationwide, the Presarios will have a wider reach through 700 plus retail selling points.

All three Pavilion models launched today work with the Windows XP operating system; while one can already buy a Presario working under Linux. Before HP and Compaq merged, the two were in fact competing in India and abroad with their Pavilion and Presario Home PCs. For over a year now, HP has suspended the Pavilion line in India. Now seemingly the company feels the time is right to aggressively address the huge chunk of the Indian PC market — over 80 per cent — that is served by local assemblers. And two brand names instead of one, might just double their arsenal. The Indian customer will need to do some close spec-watching to decide what's the best deal, even within the HP family.

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