I still remember the old days of waiting to finish the roll in the camera, giving them for developing and getting them printed. If we were to go to a local photo studio for a passport size photograph, we needed to wait for the roll on the camera to finish and get the photos say a two or three days later.

Digital Cameras changed the scenario and triggered and explosive increase the number of pictures taken.

Online Photo Printing made it easier to print these off. While people living abroad are not new to the concept of online printing, few sites now are bringing this closer to folks in India.

Generally online photo printing sites offer a variety of options including printing photos, calendars with your photos, Gifts with your memories on them etc. A few sites providing these facilities for customers in India are listed below.

http://www.picsquare.com

http://www.snapfish.in (A Hewlett Packard Service)

http://www.snapgalaxy.com

http://www.fotokraze.com

All of these sites offer competitive pricing and have a very good delivery network. Folks living in India can make use of these anyway, but this is definitely a good news for all NRIs, who often struggle to send pics home.

Go send some photo gifts home.

Popularity: 11%

Image Credit: Viernest

HP had unveiled the slim-line touchscreen system in their annual conference in Berlin. This touch-screen PC looks very much like your LCD TV and can easily be made to act like one too. With this system they have started the race for the touch-friendly PCs for homes at home budgets. It may be recollected that the original TouchSmart PC was debuted in the middle of 2007.

The system unit is all in one 22-inc

h panel display. The screen remains almost impossibly thin and includes a slot loading optical drive. There is a wireless keyboard and mouse along with a neatly packaged wireless remote too. Base spec start with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive. Higher models come with more powerful processors and a GeForce 9300M GS video card. These expensive babies also have a digital TV tuner and a decent 500GB storage.

The screen is scratch-resistant and supports a range of touch and tweak features like one-finger tap, scrolling, drag and drop actions and some two-finger touch actions for working with images and pictures. Something similar to those in the iPhone. The core OS is Vista and HP has packaged a cool TouchSmart UI for accessing Net-based info, viewing photos, playing music and video. This UI is pretty neat and achieves its purpose to thrill the user. Looks apart, there is also a cool light strip that runs along at the bottom of the display to illuminate the wireless keyboard. An ambient light sensor adjusts the brightness for your viewing pleasure.

While the machines are great for daily home users, the techies will have a lot of fumbling to do. There is not much in it for them at such a high price except for the looks. The other setback is the inability to customize or grow the system over time like the good old desktop. Look for this system more as a lifestyle accessory or an ideal gift for those who don’t do much else than browse and share.

The price start at $1999. Higher models are a bit of a rethink in the current economic situation.

In India, HP has released this model for Rs.87990.

Popularity: 17%