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Friday | 5 December, 2008
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Features

Toshiba's next-gen notebooks
Prototypes, gaming rigs and hot red laptops
David Ramli (PC World Australia (online)) 24 July, 2008 14:49:47
Yesterday Toshiba unveiled its new line-up of consumer and business notebooks, with an ultramobile prototype stealing the show.This Toshiba ‘proof of concept’ is an ultraportable device with a 5.6in screen. Featuring an Intel Atom processor, a 64GB solid-state hard drive, touch screen and built-in GPS, it’s undeniably feature-packed for such a small device. The much-vaunted Atom CPU didn’t stop the unit from having painfully slow start-up times and slow processing speeds. The unit currently requires docking to be charged, but Toshiba assures us that if the product was to go on sale, an AC port would be added. If it ever hits the market, expect to pay around $1200. The shiny looking Qosmio G50 is the flagship product of Toshiba’s new consumer notebook line-up. Although it uses an Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 CPU, potential buyers can expect to hear the magic words, 'Quad Core' thrown around in this device’s marketing material. This is because Toshiba has installed a 1.5GHz processor that crunches multimedia tasks and not because it has a Quad Core Intel CPU. Featuring an 18.4in screen with a 16:9 aspect ratio, as well as an NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT GPU, this generation of consumer notebooks continues to lack Blu-ray drives. Fortunately, the 640GB of storage and 5.1 Harmon Kardon speakers should give users with high-def content a nice platform for watching Full HD media. Note the audio scroll wheel on the left palm-rest, as well as the 'hand gesture control' program running on the lower-right of the screen. Two interesting new features from Toshiba that run off the 'Quad Core HD Processor' include 'hand gesture control' and ‘high speed video indexing’. Users can theoretically execute commands with hand gestures using the built-in webcam, but the crowd of journos and flashing cameras confused the program. The indexing works by capturing faces during playback and displaying them in the program seen here. It actually seems quite handy, and the program automatically detects and removes ads from recorded TV. Toshiba’s latest entry into the high-end gaming notebook scene is the Qosmio X300. When we asked the Toshiba execs what specs we could expect the response was “the best of the best”. Toshiba’s hesitation is understandable: if they want to enter this year’s gaming notebook market with a bang, they’ll have to wait to see what Alienware does before committing to firm details. So far we know that it’s red, has a fire motif and will be quick. Toshiba believes that there is a market for this breed of laptop, despite an RRP set to be over $4000. The 14.1in Satellite M300 is getting a makeover, with red set to be the colour of the season. The colour change follows on from the success of the form factor introduced in April. If there’s only one thing to be said for this new M300, it’s that the unit certainly stands out from the crowd. It marks a different approach from the usual, ‘change specs, keep body’ school of product refreshing, but change is not always a good thing — we’ll reserve judgement for when we review it.
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Toshiba’s latest entry into the high-end gaming notebook scene is the Qosmio X300. When we asked the Toshiba execs what specs we could expect the response was “the best of the best”. Toshiba’s hesitation is understandable: if they want to enter this year’s gaming notebook market with a bang, they’ll have to wait to see what Alienware does before committing to firm details.
Toshiba’s latest entry into the high-end gaming notebook scene is the Qosmio X300. When we asked the Toshiba execs what specs we could expect the response was “the best of the best”. Toshiba’s hesitation is understandable: if they want to enter this year’s gaming notebook market with a bang, they’ll have to wait to see what Alienware does before committing to firm details.
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