Tech Giants Unveil Latest Gadgets

Though pundits expect U.S. businesses will finally lift their tech spending this year, the lead players in technology hardware sound a lot more optimistic on the sizzling consumer market.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Thursday, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Dell (DELL) and Intel (INTC) all unveiled plans to push further into the consumer gadgets that have helped boost their growth over the past couple of years.

Thursday afternoon, H-P announced it's struck a deal to deliver its own branded digital music player based on Apple's(AAPL) iPod. More than two million iPods have been sold since their introduction in 2001, making it the No. 1 musical gadget on the market.

H-P internal research shows more than 54% of its customers download music to their PCs.

H-P said the digital music player will hit the market this summer and be priced "competitively" with rival offerings. Just Wednesday, Apple introduced a new model in its iPod line that costs $50 less than its current low-end model (priced at $299), but also offers much less storage capacity.

As part of the deal with Apple, H-P said that this summer it will start preinstalling all of its consumer PCs and notebooks with Apple's iTunes jukebox software.

Meanwhile, Intel President Paul Otellini said the company plans to home in on electronic devices this year the same way it did wireless computing in 2003, when it plunked down $300 million to promote its Centrino Wi-Fi silicon.

In the works is a slim-sized PC that Intel has helped design that can be used to share digital content wirelessly with a television screen. The PC, which can be operated with a remote control instead of a keyboard, will become available in the middle of 2004. It's expected to sell for under $800 and will be available from a variety of PC manufacturers.