We had a lot of great products over the last month. We started the month with the Dell Inspiron 531 http://www.technewsworld.com which was arguably the greenest desktop PC in the segment this quarter for consumers from a major brand, and if you aren’t concerned about the environment and your power bill you should be. This was a great example of a PC OEM focusing on what was important.

The second product was Corel’s DVD Copy 6 http://www.technewsworld.com which with the huge focus on getting videos on Cell Phones and MP3 players has become a staple for many of us wanting to watch our programming where ever we are. Corel has been stepping it up of late with some very solid and easy to use offerings and this was a good example of that practice, and frankly this has turned into a product I find it difficult to get by without.

We ended the month with AMD’s Spider platform http://www.technewsworld.com perhaps the first example of the AMD trying to take the lead in what was once the processor market and is now becoming much more of a platform play. When a trailing company takes big risks to take over market leadership it can be a painful process and this has certainly been that, but with Intel’s excellent execution of late AMD was left with little choice and Spider was surprisingly impressive.

But the product that stands above these is one I thought to be impossible and that is a true consumer server. The HP MediaSmart Server http://www.technewsworld.com is easy to set up and use and showcased collaboration between HP and Microsoft that resulted in a product that would have been impressive had it come from Apple. From out of box to set-up and use this product is a dream and, I hope, represents a future direction from both companies. Up until now only Apple has really taken a truly complex product and made it truly simple, the iPhone is based on UNIX, and the MediaSmart server is a similar quality effort.

As something that stands out and points to a much better future the MediaSmart server stands out in my mind as a leading offering. It showcased the value of a good partnership between Microsoft and a large OEM that resulted in a product that shatters the perceptions of what a product category can do. Nice job and this makes the HP MediaSmart Server my Product of the Month for November.