HCI at PC World

Richard and I managed to spend about half an hour at PC world today, just browsing stuff. We came across a few interesting products which I'll blog about from a HCI perspective.

Firstly I'll discuss screens. Many people have LCD display screens, especially for laptops and they're pretty cool. Recently I've been noticing a lot more laptops with the plastic finish on the display screen. Now this is very aesthetically pleasing and looks very cool, however as I was discussing with Richard, I personally found them rather impractical. There are two reasons for why I think they are impractical:

1) You can see your reflection in them and that would annoy me a lot whilst I was working.
2) On a sunny day, the reflection of the sun on the screen would be pretty annoying too.

However, I must admit, the quality of the display looks absolutely amazing.

The next product is the amazingly tiny laptop(not sure if laptop is the right word for it) we saw. I personally am really fond of small, sleek and compact products and this was just that. I found it really impressive that such a small product could be used like a regular laptop, although it was aesthetically pleasing and very convenient portability wise, it has drawbacks too. The main drawback was that due to it's size, everything was very very small. I found that although the web pages and text in general were readable, they would become rather annoying very quickly. It's not the type of product, as a computer scientist, I feel that I could perform tasks like programming or dissertation writing on.
(Unfortunately I can't seem to find the image to show you the product).

Finally, mp3 players. The one that struck me as very impressive was the mp3 cube (shown below) :
I found it very cool that such a minature product could have quite a huge storage space. The one on display was 512 MB, but I think they go up to 1GB. I would contemplate purchasing this product, however I don't like the fact that it's a cube. I feel a cube is a rather bulky product that would stick out quite a lot in my pocket. If the size stayed the same and it was reduced by half in depth, then I would definately purchase it.