Earlier today, Samsung proved that an Ultrabook can have all sorts of standard laptop features, such as a hard disk and an optical drive, and still be an Ultrabook. Now HP has announced its second Ultrabook–after last year’s Folio–and it too is trying carving off a unique niche. The new Envy 14 Spectre, which was just announced here at CES, is an Ultrabook for well-heeled enthusiast types who like lots of features and aren’t obsessive about their thin-and-light notebook being all that thin or all that light.

The Folio aimed for businesslike practicality rather than sizzle, but the Spectre carries over the luxe, fully-loaded feel of existing models in the Envy line. It’s got Beats audio (with a thumbwheel to adjust it). It has a light-up keyboard with individual LEDs for each key and a proximity sensor that illuminates them only when you’re there. It has up to 256GB of solid-state storage.

Speaking of luxe, the Spectre also comes with Adobe Photoshop. No, not Photoshop Elements–the full version of Photoshop. The one that sells for $699. (It also includes Premiere Elements.)

Like earier Envys, the Spectre bears an eerie resemblance to a MacBook Pro. However, its case boasts one feature I haven’t seen in any laptop before: It uses Corning’s Gorilla Glass, the same stuff that so many smartphone screens are made from. That gives it a unique glossy look and–HP says–makes it highly scratch-resistant. (I was worried that the glass might be prone to shattering if the system suffers a severe drop, but HP representatives told me that the system shouldn’t be any more fragile than any other notebook.)

One thing the Folio and the Spectre have in common is that both opt out of the quest for whisper-thinness. In fact, while the Spectre isn’t the least bit chunky, it doesn’t really look like an ultra-thin notebook at all. That’s because HP erred on the side of providing plenty of ports, including full-sized Ethernet and HDMI, plus Mini DisplayPort and USB 3.0. You should be able to hit the road with the Spectre without having to remember to tote a collection of dongles, as you might with a thinner notebook with less standard connections.

This Ultrabook may not be all that thin, but it’s other dimensions are interesting. That’s because HP crammed a 14″ screen into a case that you’ve expect to pack a 13″ display. It did so by tightening up the bezel, and the design makes for an uncommonly portable 14″ laptop.

The Spectre starts at $1399.99, which makes it a direct competitor of Samsung’s identically-priced new 13.3″ Series 9. Yet HP is calling the Spectre an Ultrabook, and Samsung doesn’t call the Series 9 an Ultrabook, even though it’s thinner and lighter than the HP. (The Spectre is “under four pounds.”)

As CES ramps up, we’re going to see Intel and hardware makers push the Ultrabook concept really hard. But really, an Ultrabook seems to be almost anything a manufacturer wants it to be, as long as it isn’t too thick and doesn’t have an AMD processor. If the Ultrabook concept doesn’t catch on with real people, maybe we can ditch the term and simply call machines such as the Envy 14 Spectre what they are: really nice-looking laptops.

.

This is my new watch. If you ever owned a Commodore 64 or an Amiga, you recognize that insignia below the display: It belongs to Commodore, the company that sold vast quantities of personal computers in the 1980s before petering out in the early 1990s.

My new watch is also an old watch: It’s a Commodore Time Master, manufactured in 1976 or thereabouts. I bought it from a specialist called LED Watch Stop, which has a supply of new-old-stock Time Masters that never got sold back in the 1970s. (It’s selling them for $229 apiece at the moment, although the price was $129 just a few days ago–I guess I lucked into a sale when I impulsively ordered one.)

The Time Master is an LED watch, using battery-hogging display technology that forces you to press a button on the right side to see the time. (I faked the LED readout in the photo above.) It’s especially unwieldy for southpaws such as me, since it’s hard to reach the button without covering the screen with your palm. And to save money, it uses a dinky LED with a magnifier, resulting in a display that’s impossible to read unless you look at it straight on.

On the plus side, the watch seems to keep good time, and it’s a heck of a geek conversation piece. (Until now, I sort of assumed that my Amiga 500, which I got in 1987, would be the last Commodore product I’d ever own and use.)

A Hamilton digital-watch prototype, as seen in Popular Science in 1970.

When Commodore starred making watches in 1975, it was a calculator company, not a computer maker: Its first PCs, the Kim-1 and PET 2001, didn’t come along until 1976 and 1977, respectively. And it did indeed make watches rather than slapping its name on no-name ones imported from Asia–its early models, in fact, were assembled in Palo Alto, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. Mine’s a later version assembled in France; still later variants used technologies from Micro Display Systems and Frontier Semiconductor,  startups acquired by Commodore.

The company entered the watch field when digital watches were still a newfangled wonder, having debuted when Hamilton released its first Pulsar in 1972. That model sold for $2100, which was more than a new Ford Pinto went for at the time. By the time Commodore released its first models three years later, digitals had become mass-market items. The company was part of a great price plunge, much as it would be in the 1980s as the Commodore 64 went from its starting price of $595 to selling for under a hundred bucks.

Patent drawing for HP's HP-01 calculator watch.

And some of the companies which Commodore competed with during the digital watch craze would be the same ones which would be major players once the PC revolution got underway a few years later.

Intel, for instance, had bought watchmaker Microma in 1972, when digital models were still high-ticket items and the market for its microprocessors barely existed; Micromas were some of the first consumer products with Intel Inside. (They also had LCD displays that didn’t make you press a button to see the time.) At the high end, Hewlett-Packard introduced the HP-01, an amazing $650 calculator watch with 28 minuscule buttons you had to press with a tiny stylus. On the low end, Texas Instruments helped to knock the price of digital watches down to $10 by flooding the market with plasticky models.

Sinclair's Black Watch.

Then there was 1975′s Black Watch, from British gizmo-designing legend Clive Sinclair. A $29.95 DIY kit, it even looked a tad like a dinky version of  his slablike ZX-80 computer, introduced five years later.

In short, the 1970s watch business was a preview of the 1980s PC business. For the first time, a bunch of electronics companies which had previously specialized in scientific equipment and business machines started learning about selling gadgets to consumers. In fact, digital watch manufacturers marketed their products as computing devices. Hamilton claimed the first Pulsar was a “Time Computer.” thinking it a sexier category than “wristwatch.”  HP called its 01 a “personal information instrument,” as if it were trying to invent the PDA a decade and a half before PDAs actually came to be.

Still, by the time the 01 came out in 1977 there were signs that the digital-watch business was destined to become a dreary commodity industry. Commodore LED watches not too different from my Time Master, for instance, were being offered as a $7.99 premium to people who sent in box tops from Hunt’s Snack Pack canned pudding, which is probably not what Commodore had in mind when it became a watchmaker.

All of the soon-to-be-PC-companies’ forays into the watch business had unhappy endings. Discouraged by the HP-01′s sales, HP killed a successor called the HP-02. (Today, the 01 goes for big bucks on eBay.) The Black Watch had so many problems–it ran at different speeds in different temperatures and the batteries sometimes exploded–that it nearly drove Sinclair into bankruptcy.

Microma watches with Intel 5830 microcircuits, as seen in Intel's 1975 annual report.

In 1978, Intel sold its watch designs to Timex and the Microma name to a Swiss company. It had taken such a beating on the whole effort that cofounder Gordon Moore continued to wear a Microma watch for years to remind himself not to do anything so foolish again Texas Instruments held on a bit longer, but called it quits in 1981.

And Commodore? Well, I’m not sure when it sold its last timepiece. But in Commodore: A Company on the Edge, Brian Bagnall says that the company brought watches to the 1981 Consumer Electronics Show but didn’t have much luck with them. “The Commodore name,” he explains, “was not one people associated with watches.”

Motorola's TI-powered Motoactv sports watch.

The timing of all this failure turned out to be fortuitous. It let the companies in question refocus their energies on the emerging PC market. While that too turned out to be a cutthroat business, it had staying power. TI didn’t fare too well, but Commodore did for a time, and Intel and HP are still at it in 2012. Even if watches had sold better, they would have been a distraction.

Then again, in the technology industry it’s always a mistake to declare any product category to be permanently dead. Thanks to products such as WIMM and Motorola’s Motoactv, which pack smartphone-like power and run sophisticated apps, digital watches are intriguing again in a way they haven’t been in decades. The Motoactv even uses a Texas Instruments OMAP chip, making it a very, very distant descendant of the watches that TI sold in the 1970s.  And the notion of Intel and HP getting back into watches, in one way or another, isn’t the least bit kooky.

There’s even a modern-day Commodore selling a Intel-based Commodore 64. It would have every right to start hawking watches, I suppose. But unless its timepieces, like my Time Master, are custom-designed products based on the company’s own technologies and components, I won’t be tempted. We Commodore watch owners, you see, tend to be kind of snobbish.

“Palm was ahead of its time in trying to build a phone software platform using Web technology, and we just weren’t able to execute such an ambitious and breakthrough design,” said Paul Mercer, former senior director of software at Palm, who oversaw the interface design of WebOS and recruited crucial members of the team. “Perhaps it never could have been executed because the technology wasn’t there yet.”

It may just be me, but I can’t remember many years as peculiar as 2o11 turned out to be for this business. Even demonstrably gifted and sensible people like Netflix’s Reed Hastings seemed to fall victim to a fever that made them do strange, ill-advised things. I hope that 2012 is a tad less weird, but 2011 has been fascinating to cover, and never, ever boring.

In hallowed Technologizer tradition, it’s time to recap the year in dumb. Celebrities, corporate intrigue, sex, violence–they’re all here. Gird yourself, people: Things are about to get really stupid.

(As always, thanks to Esquire’s iconic Dubious Achievement Awards and Business 2.0′s 101 Dumbest Moments in Business for inspiring this project. Those lists no longer exist, but we soldier on.)

January

1. Stop this woman before she tweets again.

Proceedings begin in a court case charging that rocker Courtney Love defamed fashion designer Dawn “Boudoir Queen” Simorangkir on Twitter and MySpace. A judge eventually rules that Love is guilty. She’s booted off Twitter for more than two months and must pay Simorangkir $430,000. By May, Love is in Twitter legal hot water again–this time over her tweets about her former lawyer.

2. Thrilling! At least if you hated Flock.

Social gaming behemoth Zynga buys pioneering social browser Flock. Shawn Hardin, Flock’s CEO, says he’s “thrilled” by the development. But it’s not until three months later that anyone involved admits that the acquisition is terrible news for Flock fans: the browser is being discontinued.

February

3. Bing sting.

Google injects fake results into search results to confirm its suspicion that Microsoft’s Bing is watching IE users’ Google searches and blending data from the results into Bing results. It publicly accuses Microsoft of cheating; Microsoft responds by mocking Google’s “spy-novelesque stunt.”

4. Penney which way you can.

The New York Times’ David Segal reports that retail relic J.C. Penney’s impressive rankings in Google search results on an array of topics have been goosed by the creation of phantom sites such as bulgariapropertyportal.com, which exist only to be stuffed with links to Penney’s pages. Google promises to take “corrective action” and Penney denies all knowledge.

5. Pity they couldn’t have bided their time until this digital thing blew over.

Once-mighty bookstore chain Borders declares bankruptcy and starts shuttering stores. In July, it announces that it’s going out of business, period. The retailer’s many missteps included refusing to operate its own Web site for years, doubling down on CD sales at the same time that the iPod was changing music forever, and taking e-books far less seriously than its major rivals, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

March

6. But wait–actors are real people too, aren’t they? Aren’t they?

At the CTIA conference in Orlando, Samsung shows videos featuring “real” people heartily endorsing its Galaxy Tab. They’re real, all right–real actors, as I eventually figure out.

7. Good to hear they can take a little criticism.

In the same video presentation, Samsung shows a mock article about the Galaxy Tab from a fake business magazine. The text is cribbed from my not-entirely-positive review of the original Galaxy Tab.

8. $3 billion worth of fail.

AT&T launches a $39 billion bid to acquire T-Mobile USA. The former Ma Bell is apparently pretty darn confident that the deal will go through: It tells T-Mobile that it’ll pay it a $3 billion fee (plus valuable spectrum) if it doesn’t. But both the Justice Department and the FCC hate the merger. In December, AT&T pulls the plug and says that T-Mobile will get its cash and spectrum.

9. In the 1990s, this would have been done with VHS and dial-up modems.

Rather than striking deals with movie companies, super-genius startup Zediva’s new streaming service takes advantage of what its founders think is a legal loophole: It involves DVDs and banks of Internet-connected DVD players. Oddly enough, Hollywood is nonplussed. In August, a judge closes the loophole.

10. Bring me the head of Babar the First.

Bob Parsons, founder of exuberantly cheesy domain registrar Go Daddy sparks outrage when he shares a video of himself shooting an elephant in Zimbabwe. He says that the pachyderm was a rogue and that starving villagers will benefit from the protein it provides. PETA, oddly enough, isn’t placated.

11. A blow to dupes and patsies everywhere.

Germany-based Auction site Swoopo, which turned bidding into gambling by making users pay a non-refundable fee each time they bid on an item, goes dark as its parent company files for bankruptcy.

April

12. A day or two? Hey, no biggie.

Sony’s PlayStation Network suffers an outage, for unspecified reasons; Sony calmly says it may take “a full day or two” to restore service.

13. Flippin’ ridiculous.

Two years after spending $550 million for Flip camcorder maker Pure Digital–and one day before a new Flip was scheduled to debut–Cisco suddenly loses interest in consumer products and kills the entire Flip line. At the time of its death, it’s the nation’s best-selling camcorder.

14. Apparently he was under the mistaken impression that BBC stood for “BlackBerry Cheerleaders.”

Irritated at questions about BlackBerry security and censorship issues in India and the Middle East, RIM founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis abruptly declares that his TV interview with the BBC is over.

15. PrayStation.

Sony says that the PlayStation Network has suffered an “external intrusion” and won’t be back online until it’s been fortified against further attacks. It make no predictions about when that might be. In all, it takes almost six weeks before it’s fully up and running again–and it turns out that whoever broken in stole personal information such as names and address for 70 million customers. Oh, and maybe credit-card information, too.

16. We said “professional.” We didn’t say “good.”

After seven months of ever-increasing hype, RIM releases the BlackBerry PlayBook, which it calls “the first professional tablet.” It’s remarkably buggy, includes a nearly unusable version of Flash, and lacks the one software feature that’s synonymous with the BlackBerry name: built-in e-mail.

May

17. The fine art of pointlessly raising expectations.

In an interview, HP’s European honcho says that its TouchPad–which was announced in February and isn’t supposed to ship until an unspecified date in the summer–will be better than the iPad. “We call it number one plus,” he helpfully explains.

18. Insert your own “weiner” joke here.

Anthony Weiner, a Democratic congressman from New York, means to send a dirty photograph of himself to a woman he doesn’t know as a direct message on Twitter. He accidentally posts it as a public tweet. After trying to convince the world that his account was hacked–and additional disclosures about other embarrassing tweets–he admits the cover-up and eventually resigns.

June

19. I love you. You love me.

Addressing mounting criticism from shareholders and the media, RIM co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie lavish praise on each other. “Jim and I have the perfect balance to make the hard decisions,” says Lazaridis. “…RIM has taken a unique path and the reason why we do things might not always be obvious from the outside.”

20. Maybe “never” would have been a better release date after all.

After fourteen years of delays, legendary unreleased game Duke Nukem–perhaps the most vaporous single product in the history of vaporware–is finally released. The reviews are unanimous: It’s a disaster in virtually every way a game can be disastrous, from the abysmal taste (alien rape jokes!) to the antiquated gameplay.

21. Sadly, threatening to withhold copies of Duke Nukem Forever II proved a surprisingly ineffective threat.

Griping about the “venom” in reviews of Duke Nukem Forever, PR firm the Redner Group says it might stop sending review copies of games to the publications in question. It ends up having to apologize for the threat and is fired by 2K, the game’s publisher.

July

22. Bad Revue.

Logitech says the failure of the lackluster software platform known as Google TV has cost it tens of millions of dollars, and that sales of its Google TV-based Revue box are “negative“–apparently meaning that more of them are being returned than sold.

23. You can’t miss it–it’s right in between the fake Sunglass Hut and the place selling counterfeit Cinnabons.

A blogger visiting Kunming, China visits an “Apple Store” that turns out to be an elaborate fraud–from the tasteful wooden tabletops to the spiral staircase to the name tags worn by employees. It and another faux store are soon shut down by Chinese officials.

24. Ungrateful Netflix customers unfairly resent perfectly reasonable massive price hike.

Netflix changes its pricing policies in ways that impose much higher prices on many customers: a $9.99 plan now costs $16.98. Its cryptic blog post on the changes gets more than 12,000 comments. Very few of them are from customers who are delighted by the news. Many say they’re quitting the service; the company goes on to lose 800,000 subscribers in the third quarter alone.

25. Apple losing iPhone prototypes? Sorry, not plausible.

In an incident that doesn’t make the news until September, Apple security employees enter a San Francisco home and search it for a lost iPhone prototype which they believe is inside. The San Francisco Police Department initially denies being involved in the visit, then says that it was; the home’s occupant says he didn’t know the searchers were Apple staffers rather than police officers, and that he wouldn’t have allowed them inside if that had been clear.

HP plans to continue to be active in the development and support of webOS. By combining the innovative webOS platform with the development power of the open source community, there is the opportunity to significantly improve applications and web services for the next generation of devices.

This could turn out to be good news. But even if it does, it might be years before we know for sure. (Mozilla was open-sourced by Netscape in 1998, but wasn’t until 2004–when Firefox was released–that it was clear the platform had a bright future. 
 
TechCrunch’s Leena Rao is reporting that HP says it’ll do a new WebOS tablet–I’m already thinking of it as the TouchPad II–but it may not show up until 2013. I wonder what the tablet market will be like by then?

The Foleo 13 is a 13″ system with an Intel Core i5 processor. It’s pretty thin (.71″) and pretty light (3.3 pounds) but thicker and heavier than the Air and Toshiba’s Portege Z830. It has, however, a fuller complement of ports than the Air, including Ethernet, HDMI, and USB 3.0, with no dongles required. HP claims up to 9 hours of battery life vs. Apple’s 7 hours; that’s impressive if independent testing backs it up. And the price–$899.99 for a machine with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of solid-state storage–undercuts the most comparable MacBook Air by $400.

Buyers of Windows laptops have historically had a limited appetite for systems that emphasize portability rather that offering as many specs as possible at a low price. I don’t think it’s a given that Ultrabooks will catch on–HP’s press release for the Folio quotes IDC saying that it expects sales of 95 million Ultrabooks a year by 2015–but I like the compact form factor and am happy to see PCs with solid-state disks getting affordable, so I hope the category thrives.

Josh Topolsky of The Verge reports:

HP CEO Meg Whitman just told a room full of Palm and HP employees that the company doesn’t yet know what to do with webOS. “It’s really important to me to make the right decision, not the fast decision,” she told those gathered with her on the HP campus, adding that a decision would come in the next three to four weeks. This comes as a bit of a surprise, as reports recently swirled that the computer-maker has been in discussions to sell of the troubled mobile platform to the highest bidder. “If HP decides [to keep webOS], we’re going to do it in a very significant way over a multi-year period,” she said, adding that “it’s a very expensive proposition, but HP can make that bet.”

You can’t fault Whitman for being flummoxed here. The combined actions of her two predecessors, Mark Hurd and Léo Apotheker, conspired to leave WebOS in the worst possible situation. Unless some brilliant white knight we don’t know about arrives on the scene, the only happy outcome involves Whitman reversing Apotheker’s decision to get out of the WebOS hardware business–and HP then somehow designing and marketing one or more tablets that are so good that everyone agrees the company is giving the iPad serious competition.

What do you think the chances are that’ll happen?

HP announced a 3D PC display and a 3D PC today. To me, at least, the most interesting thing about them is that the company chose a different flavor of 3D for each device.

First the display. Its official moniker is the HP 2311gt 3D monitor, and it’s a 23″ LED-backlit display. Like most 3D movies you see in theaters, the 3D is passive, which means that its uses polarized glasses that don’t have any embedded electronics and don’t cost a lot of money. In fact, the display and two set of glasses go for $299.99, or about what you might pay for two pair of active-shutter glasses alone.