HP Presto Email Printer

Link of the Day:
http://www.presto.com/

I heard this advertised on Live365. (Which is a great place to find lots of music, but hard to buy off of. Its streaming radio, and they use shoutcast, so without refreshing the web page, you can't really tell what you're listening to. But that's another day...)

Its basically a printer in a box that prints your emails out for you.

When I first heard the ad, I just kinda laughed, like "Who in their right mind would get this?"

Well, my grandma's birthday is coming up, and I was trying to decide what to get her. Now, I'm not so good at picking out rugs or drapes or quilts. But I can do technology, so my gifts usually entail some sort of thing with chips inside. What can I say? I LIKE Chips!

I ws looking at several photo frames (LCD) and trying to decide which one I liked, when I heard the ad on Live365 (no, I don't have a premium account... ). So, I checked it out, laughed and went on with life. I was considering it later though..... and thought to myself, hmm... Grandma doesn't have internet or email. And I'm always wishing she would. I wonder if this would help?

So, I checked it out some more... $150 for the printer and an ink cartridge... Not unreasonable. Wait! $10 a month for the "Presto" Service? Uh...

Let's see... $10 a month for internet. Plus $150 for the printer... Plus ink and paper? Wow, HP is really setting this up for a cash cow here.

You see, just in case you didn't know, HP makes a *lot* of money off of ink. Last year, in 2007, HP got 42% of its operating profit (2.63 billion) from its Imaging and Printing Group. That was nearly twice the amount from its Personal Systems Group, which includes PCs. So its certainly in HP's best interest to get more printers out there....

So, to recap:
HP is offering basically a cheap computer with a printer attached for $150 plus $10 a month. Which means that you're basically buying an internet connection anyway, since cheaper dialup services go for $10 a month.

While its perhaps still a good deal if you really don't want to set up your own stuff, and don't know anything about the options, I don't think I'll be following this deal any further....