Lightweight Dragonfly for the Mobile Professionals from HPI

During the launch of Dragonfly, a small, lightweight, 360 degrees, touchscreen laptop, Vickram Bedi, Senior Director, Personal Systems, HP Inc India talked to us about the various dimensions of the laptop industry.

What kind of laptops do you have for creative professionals?

We have a whole range of Z series of laptops which are enabled with heavy-graphics processing capacities, we also have products for gaming, which uses heavy graphics. Dragonfly is for customers who are mobile and hence want a lightweight product which gives fast performance while blog writing, web browsing or content writing.

You said that you’ve added keyboard protection to the laptops. Spilling of liquid on the keyboard is a major cause for its damage, so can you explain it a little bit more?

Across various models we have made spill-proof keyboard, which protects the laptop from damage. We also have additional protection features for select laptops.

Nowadays it’s also being argued that laptops are gradually diminishing in usage and people are shifting to smartphones. In that context how would you place Dragonfly?

That’s been an ongoing question and I think and our approach has been more of a question of giving the best in laptops. The days of choosing one or the other have gone. The customer has also become very savvy and technology is very high. Earlier the technology was very limited. People were using it for email, browsing etc. Nowadays the customers are doing intensive work. Even for entertainment the customers have started preferring larger screens, with new streaming like Amazon Prime, Netflix or other apps available. So i think there’s space for both of them, for what we call the PC2DotO experience. Moreover, what we’ve seen that the gen Z is using the laptops a lot more than before and they’re using it for creating. So i think that notion that one size fits all is not right. There are some things that smartphones are really great at and that’s great; we should continue with it. But there are also some things that laptops are really great at. Laptops aren’t great for making phone calls and the smartphone is not great when you have to write something, or making a presentation or doing what we call deep work, which is your signature work. I don’t think the smartphones were meant to be replacements for laptops. Sometimes they can, but a point comes when it starts becoming counter-productive.

How is HPI’s growth in terms of revenue for the laptops over the last couple of years?

It’s been strong, considering the market which has been a flat market for last couple of years. If you look at the PC market our growth has been strong for the last couple of years. If you look at the marketshare profile, it shows that our growth has been higher than the market growth. I’m talking about India. Globally also we’ve grown, but more so in India.

Quite often we launch products in the world first of all and we’re proud of launching this product today. We set a trend then obviously other people follow us. We are very proud of a lot of things here which focus on lightweight, which is an actual benefit to customers, apart from thin and all those features. Our use of ocean-bound recycled plastic, which we hope people will pick up and will implement as well. It’s a products which is great in look but is also strong in performance and is yet very responsible for the planet as well.