Traveling in to NYC on the train I read in the NYTimes that an announcement of a new line of PC’s called XPS will be made today by Michael S. Dell at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Central Park South in Manhattan.
I went to the Times Square Weston for a Technology in Small Business event by ZDnet and Intel with a fine keynote by Gay Gaddis who’s responsible for those glossy Dell circulars and emails we receive every month. Gay gave a great talk about Small Business Marketing and Advertising and how using computers has helped her create a very successful company; C3.
It was fun New York event because the audience was very attentive and with all our collective experience we were well able to contribute to the conversation. As the meeting broke up at noon, I caught up with a few friends who were there, I asked Gay if she was going to the Ritz-Carlton, but she knew nothing about the announcement and had to catch a flight back to Austin.
So I headed uptown on a glorious September day, the fine staff at the Ritz-Carlton directed me to the lower mezzanine and I was in luck as the event hadn’t started yet. I went for a short walk in Central Park and the place was buzzing with people enjoying the fine weather.
I went back to the posh Hotel and signed-in just after the BBC, got the spec sheet on the new Dell XPS brand and the expanded digital TV portfolio. The first thing that caught my eye was the NVIDIA 256 GeForce Go 7800 GTX Ultra, so right there and then I knew this was not your Fathers Dell PC.
When the event began I walked into the room and straight towards a 50 inch plasma HDTV, there was an NFL game on and the players looked like they were in the room.
Next I came upon the XPS M170, a 915 Express Chipset Centrino laptop with a 17" TrueLife widescreen display. I powered it ON, fired up the Wi-Fi, logged-on to Channel9 and posted to the community that I was about to meet Michael Dell!
Michael is a very mellow dude and I was impressed once he began to talk, because he really is a System Builder after all. I got to ask the first question after the formal presentation and I told him I was a Windows Vista beta tester and Michael said I am too. I could see that these systems are Windows Vista enabled. Michael directed me to his Windows Vista site, cool!