Hewlett-Packard is planning the launch of a new pair of desktop computers, designed for families. Named the HP Omni, it is an all-in-one desktop PC, and will go on sale on January 08, 2012. This week also brought news of the HP Pavilion HPE h9 Phoenix, a tower-style PC for gamers.

While the Omni sports a 27-inch screen, Beats Audio technology, an optional Blu-ray disc drive and an HDMI high-definition TV connection with a price tag starting at $1,200, the Pavilion will come in at $1,150, with a more powerful configuration costing $1,500. Both these PCs will be launched two days before the start of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where several companies plan to unveil a slew of new handheld gadgets, tablets and super-thin laptops known as ultrabooks.

“All-in-ones are the growth spot in the desktop space,” said Chris Connery, an analyst at Santa Clara, California-based research firm DisplaySearch.

Hewlett-Packard is trying to gain growth in its $39.6 billion PC division after Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman’s October decision to keep the group in-house. CEO Whitman made some critical decisions early on, like keeping the much debated $40 billion-plus PC business. When Leo Apotheker was handling the command, HP was considering a sale or spin-off  for the PC division, but Whitman reverted.

It proved a great opportunity for competitor Dell, who’s of the opinion that HP’s initial idea to sell off their PC business was a bad one.  Rather, Dell is very much optimistic about this market and sees it as an integral part of their business moving forward.

“There are big economic reasons to be in the client business. About 95 per cent of all disk drives go in PCs, and about five per cent in servers and storage,” Dell added. “From a cost standpoint you get enormous scale, and if you’re not in that business you cannot offer an end-to-end solution – and you have to charge a lot more for it. The client device is changing. We have smartphones and tablets, but the new devices are augmenting the PC – we don’t see the PC going away at all.”

HP still grasping for webOS direction

Moving ahead, HP is not directionless as the company is making unexpected inroads in healthcare via WebOS, as medical researchers develop applications for the newly open-source platform. Andrew B. Holbrook, a Stanford University Department of Radiology research associate has developed an app allowing HP’s TouchPad to operate an MRI machine from inside the scanning room with the interface with a PC server located elsewhere.

As the medical community and their requirements are continuously expanding, HP may be on the brink of finding a new niche. Besides, Holbrook plans to continue to use the TouchPad in clinical trials at Stanford this year and develop more WebOS applications. The cloud is usually be associated with either storage or computing in today’s technological cycle. The growing interest around this sector has encouraged companies to develop apps and cloud systems for the healthcare realm. Traditional healthcare technologies have anchored the industry for some time, but the gleaming demands for better data analysis, today’s cloud technology is being tapped.