Thumbs Up on Design for New Philips and HP Products

Like the fashion world, all the hardware folks are taking the wrappers off their fall lineups. Either I've gone soft, or some of these folks have really been thinking about ways to make the user experience easier. Maybe they've all caught Apple fever, but even Apple could learn a few tricks.

Take the new Philips Flat TVs. You lug home this gorgeous hunk of a 47-inch LCD, attach a few cables, and find yourself staring at a picture. This is where most normal people haven't a clue if what they're looking at is worth what they paid (in this case nearly $3,000). That's because normal people were never supposed to figure out how to calibrate the picture on the screen.

So here's what Philips did. Philips made a quick quiz like an eye test—with no wrong answers. You're asked to look at two images on a divided screen (a right and left) and choose the one you like better. Eight answers later, you've got a TV calibrated for your room and your tastes. You may be thinking about which penguin looks better, but in fact you're selecting hue, saturation, contrast, and a few other things you probably never expected to have control of. I went wild over this interactive setup, and overall, the Ambilight LCDs seem a tad crisper and clearer than most I've seen.

HP rolled out their new product line this week, but the one that caught my eye was the 8-megapixel R937 (OK, HP is name-challenged as well). Check out the size of the preview area on this camera! It's a 3.7-inch screen (that's just a sliver bigger than the iPhone's) and it uses touch-screen technology to edit and organize your photos. Attached to the camera is a little stylus that looks like a guitar pick to make your touch a bit less dependent on slim fingers. Other manufacturers have built touch screens into their cameras, but HP has used the full real estate of the camera and has some really nice software that you'll want to touch. It's got all the other features, like image stabilization.

Does that mean I like the design of everything I've seen? Sadly, no. Stay with me to find out about the "not so hots."