When the lovely people at HP emailed to ask if I’d like to treat myself to a test-drive of one of their Pavilion x360 laptops, I naturally assumed it was actually a trick (Look at me – I got a hallowe’en joke in the very first line of this post – impressed?!). Upon further inquiry, it turns out that it wasn’t a trick – they wanted to showcase their nifty new laptops and how child-friendly they are, so they duly dispatched one to us and we’ve been playing with it all week. It even turned up with a swanky printer too – so no excuses when it comes to decorations this year.
Note: Because I’m a humble kind of guy, I’m utterly blown away by HP sending us such a cool piece of tech to test out – so I’ll probably be going on about this one for a while yet. Bear with me – I could easily stretch this all the way past Christmas…! Anyway, back to the job in hand: Hallowe’en.
HP sent us a load of spooky Hallowe’en goodies to make the big night a success too – most of which we’ve already eaten. Ahem. Anyway, there was loads of stuff in there – though naturally it was the shiny new laptop which caught my boy’s attention most. As you can see from the photo below:
All attempts at getting them to do what the ‘challenge’ outlines have so far been met with protests of “Dad, we just want to try out a few more games…” and the like – Robert has been religiously playing the Lego Minifigures game, while Freddie prefers the ‘Furchester Hotel’ game from Cbeebies. They are utterly engrossed – even more so for the fact that the nifty touch-screen makes both games a lot simpler for little fingers. Here they are, engrossed:
Whilst I might not have been able to interest them in my crafty creations (yet!), I did manage to utilise the x360’s handy features for one of my own creations – a pumpkin! The following set of photos illustrates JUST how crappy my pumpkin carving skills are – though using the x360 for inspiration did make things slightly better than if I’d just gone free-style, I suspect. Please don’t judge me…
As you can see, we’ve only just begun to get to grips with this exciting new piece of tech (sorry HP, this might take a while!) but we’ve already got our (grubby little) mits on quite a few of it’s cool features. Next thing I’m aiming to try out: movie making. First I’ve got to figure out what we’re all going to dress up as on the big night… time to head over to Pinterest!
More on this breaking story to follow…! :)