HP just announced its new range of Electronic Skins, aka eSkins. eSkins will function as a new display technology to personalize consumer electronics. It’s a flexible and reflective color film that can be used on a wide range of devices. Anything from cellphones to digital cameras, MP3 players, netbooks, notebooks, you name it.

eSkins is capable of reflectively displaying icons and alpha-numeric characters to personalize nearly any device. It’s compatible with roll-to-roll plastic circuits, allowing it to merge with proprietary, electrically controllable “inks” to achieve print-like color performance and transparency. Visibility is said to be excellent, even under direct sunlight, and it can also turn transparent, to reveal the surface below.

HP was late getting in on the netbook game. There were a number of netbooks already on the market before HP debuted its first machine. HP is now adding several more netbooks to its lineup in an effort to grab a larger portion of the booming netbook market.

Among the new HP Mini models being added to the lineup today are the HP Mini 110 XP Edition, the Mini 110 Mi Edition, and the HP Mini 1101. The Mini 110 is available in pink chic, black swirl, and white swirl colors. The Mini 1101 is available in black swirl only.

A few weeks ago HP recalled 70,000 laptop batteries, but they aren’t done yet. They are recalling another 15,000 batteries sold in China. There aren’t any reports of actual fire or flames this time, but the batteries are prone to overheating, and can pose a fire hazard.

At the moment, details about the models affected are scarce, but the batteries were used in laptops manufactured between late 2007 and early 2008, and include models sold under the HP Pavilion and Compaq Presario brands.

AT&T will be launching another smartphone from Hewlett-Packard. The iPAQ K3. The codename is “Obsidian”, the date is November 30. This new smartphone works on triband HSDPA as well as quadband EDGE.

Some other features include Windows Mobile 6.5 OS, a 2.8-inch QVGA display, a 2MP camera, a full QWERTY keyboard, a 256MB of RAM, a 512MB ROM, a microSD card slot, a 3.5mm headphone jack, GPS and WiFi. No info on pricing at the moment.

For awhile there batteries were getting recalled fairly often, but now it’s been quite awhile since we’ve seen a major recall involving laptop batteries. Sadly, its back in the news. Today, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission and Health Canada, in cooperation with Hewlett-Packard, has issued a voluntary recall of about 70,000 Li-ion batteries.

Apparently, these cells can “overheat, posing a fire and burn hazard to consumers,”. Thus far, the firm and CPSC have received two separate reports of batteries overheating and rupturing. The result is “flames/fire that caused minor property damage.”

I have never really understood why companies like Dell and HP never made a business notebook that was cool looking. Major computer markers always try to make consumer notebooks attractive, but the business machines were stodgy black boxes with the sex appeal of a tube sock.

HP is changing that with the introduction of its new HP ProBook series of notebook computers. The line has attractive colors with a choice of merlot or glossy finishes. The machines can be had in 14-inch, 15.6-inch, and 17-inch form factors. All of the machines can be fitted with HP Mobile Broadband using Gobi technology to allow the modem to operate on several broadband networks from different providers.

Just in time to compete with Dell’s Studio 15, HP is offering the Pavilion dv3t. It’s a 16:9 widescreen 13.3-inch, with a Core 2 Duo T6400, a Blu-ray option and a optional 9-cell battery that will give you up to 7 hours of battery life.

Some other features are a webcam, up to 500GB of hard drive space, and it comes in two flavors: Espresso black and Moonlight white. Prices start at $799.

With the poor global economy, it’s no surprise that computer sales are slipping around the globe. The only segment of the computer industry that is actually growing robustly is the netbook category as consumers look to lower cost devices.

Gartner Research announced its global PC shipment numbers for Q1 2009 today and HP sits at the top of the list. HP shipped 19.8% of the all PCs shipped globally. Total global PC shipments for the quarter were 67.2 million units.

Patent disputes are so common that many of us just overlook them today. It seems like each week a new dispute is filed between two companies. HP and Cornell University have been fighting it out in court over a patent infringement suit for a while now.

Cornell filed the suit alleging that HP was infringing on Cornell patents by selling HP PA-8000 microprocessors along with workstations and servers using the processors. A jury awarded Cornell $53 million to $184 million in damages.

At CES 2009 I spent some time in meetings with the guys from AMD. One of the products they were showing off at the time was the HP Pavilion DV2 ultra-portable notebook. The machine was the showpiece for a new AMD processor aimed at the ultra-portable market.

The DV2 uses the AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 CPU and has a 12.1-inch LED backlit LCD with a 1280 x 800 screen resolution. The little DV2 is not MacBook Air thin, but it is a svelte little beast. Measurements are 11.5-inches L x 9.5-inches D x 0.93 to 1.29-inches H and weighs 3.95 pounds.

The economy is bad and computer sales are at the lowest point seen in years. Many of the top computer makers in the world are laying off employees to maintain profitability and viability. Despite the poor performance of the computer industry as a whole, the netbook segment of the market is booming.

DisplaySearch reports that netbooks are expected to grow 65% year over year in 2009 for a total of 27 million units expected to ship. The traditional notebook market as a whole is expected to grow only 3% year over year.

According to the WSJ, HP is looking at what Netbooks can do running Android, the operating system that Google created for mobile phones. It’s been confirmed by HP’s VP Satjiv Chahil. Whether or not this will become an actual product, no one knows.

If HP released some netbooks running Android, it would be a whole new a new battle between the Internet giant and Microsoft.

In previous reports from Greenpeace, HP, Lenovo, and Dell haven’t done very badly, but the trio has failed to meet Greenpeaces expectations this time. They made promises they could not keep. All three had promised to eliminate PVC and brominated flame retardants in their products by the end of this year, but now they will apparently not be able to meet that deadline.

The only one to offer up a new deadline is Lenovo, who says they will now do it by the end of 2010. On the other end of the spectrum, Philips has jumped from 15th place to 4th, largely due to new recycling initiatives.

Office workers who work in certain industries need special computers to get their work done. A standard desktop that is used for checking email and writing word documents in a normal office just won’t cut it in a graphics design or CAD department. For this type of environment, a powerful workstation computer is needed.

HP has announced its new Z series workstations today that use the new Intel Xeon 5500 series processors. The new series includes the Z800, Z600, and Z400 workstations that are aimed at the CAD, engineering, medical imaging, finance and oil/gas industries.

HP just debuted its new Pavilion Elite m9600 series with Core i7 processors. HP gives you a decent amount of power for the price. The base configuration gets you a Core i7 920 2.66Ghz processor, 4GB of RAM, 500GB hard drive, NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GS graphics and a DVD burner, all for $950.

You can kick that up to a Core i7 940 2.93GHz processor, 12GB of RAM, a couple of 1TB hard drives, 1GB ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics and a Blu-ray burner. HP also has four new 16:9 monitors, the 18.5-inch w1858, 20-inch 2009m, 21.5-inch 2159m and 23-inch w2338h. The latter two include HDMI inputs, and the prices range from $170 to $300.