If you thought your Apple Mac Book Pro was the hot 'it' fashion accessory, think again. Fashion designer Vivienne Tam has teamed up with Hewlett Packard to create a HP Mini Vivienne Tam edition which will retail for $700 and will visually reflect her colorful design sensibilities. The mini laptop is geared towards a female consumer audience with its light weight, 10.2 inch screen, red and pink peony plastic exterior (which matches Tam’s Spring clothing line thank you very much), red interior, gold letters, and the double happiness Asian symbol printed on the enter key. The new laptop is also full of the usual suspects such as, a web cam, wireless and USB/USD, a 60 gigabyte drive and 1 gigabyte memory, and an almost full-size keyboard. The HP Mini Vivienne Tam will be sold in Tam’s store in New York City’s SoHo district this Spring, but is available via pre-order through Hewlett Packard with anticipated shipment date of early December. If you cannot wait until then, a plain version in either black, pink or silver will be available in November. Um, if I were a PC (I’m a Mac), then I would wait for the easy to carry, clutch-like appearance of the designer edition with the eye-catching colors, symbols and gold lettering. Really, isn’t that the point of it being a designer item, the perfect blend of technology and fashion?

Does anyone remember the mood rings from the ‘70s? You know, the stone that changed colors as you changed moods. The color black showed a cauldron of anxiety and irritation brewing, turquoise was the color of peace and tranquility, dark blue meant love and joyfulness and that pea soup yellow-green color spelled trouble. Well, now you can relive those days of emoting on your hand with electronics firm Phillips new SKIN research project “emotion-sensitive dress” prototype. The dress is made up of two layers: the inner layer contains biometric sensors (their term, not mine) that picks up a person’s emotions and projects them in color and light onto the second, outer layer. So, can you walk down the street and be green with envy and show it? Check. Show the world that you are feeling joy and love? Check. Now, although the technology behind it sounds fascinating, do I really want the world to know my every emotion? Um, not!