On Monday, HP announced that they would extend their offers in the home entertainment area, by launching the MediaSmart ex485 and ex487 home servers.

While the two models aren’t made to be high-end devices, both of them are certainly aimed to a wider range of potential users, as HP stressed that the home servers are compatible with Windows and Mac environments.

The servers’ specifications might not be quite astonishing, as they are powered by a 2GHz Celeron processor and have 2GB of DDR2 RAM. However, the most rewarding experience comes from software than hardware and, therefore, HP really did a good job in bundling an entire suite of applications that will make sharing and storing data easier to do.

As an example, HP Media Collector is a program that scans all digital files from users across the network and which copies them onto the server and organizes them neatly. After all media content is copied on the server’s hard drive, any user on the network will be able to access it through streaming.

Other useful applications include HP Photo View, Photo Publisher and iTunes server. The latter organizes and shares media libraries across the network.

Furthermore, the server can also act as a central backup tool. As the user can upgrade the station with up to an astonishing 9TB of storage space, virtually anyone is able to backup their data or their entire computer onto the server, because both Apple Time Capsule and windows Home Server Backup protocols are supported.

The 750GB version ex485 will have a price tag of $599 and the 1.5TB ex487 will cost $750. The two versions will be available starting February 2009, but pre-orders will begin on January 5, 2009.