Thursday, July 22, 2004
Toshiba's New Media Center
Posted by Suhit Gupta in "NEWS" @ 02:00 PM
"Toshiba's Digital Products Division has announced the launch of the new Qosmio (pronounced "koss-mee-oh") brand of AV notebook PCs. Toshiba's Qosmio is an integrated, mobile personal entertainment and computing device that offers users a unique "four-in-one" experience with TV, audio, DVD recorder and PC functionality. The announcement of the new Qosmio series represents a significant milestone in Toshiba's global strategy to lead the digital convergence space and meet the rising demand for easy-to-use, personal entertainment solutions."
This new Qosmio E15-AV101 notebook is definitely an innovative product and features a nice 15" screen though future versions will have wide-screen displays of up to 17-inches. The notebook comes standard with a built-in TV tuner, DVR capabilities and a high-quality QosmioEngine that enables increased video and graphics performance. It also includes SRS WOW & TruSurround XT technology and large harman/kardon stereo speaker. It also comes with Intel Pentium M Processor 735 (1.70GHz, 2MB L2 cache) 512MB RAM (which you will presumably upgrade) and 80GB drive and tons of USB 2 ports + integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
One concern - it only supports a 1024x768 resolution and while that is great for TV quality viewing, it is a bit low for just plain old laptop usage. The other concern is that while the specs on the laptop are great, Windows MCE typically requires a >2.5GHz processor to work well. Like I have mentioned before, when I installed MCE on a <2GHz machine with 512MB RAM, it basically crawled. So we will have to wait for benchmarks to see how it performs. Anyways, it will be available for $2699 which seems like a really good price for a laptop loaded with such goodies. Nice.
This new Qosmio E15-AV101 notebook is definitely an innovative product and features a nice 15" screen though future versions will have wide-screen displays of up to 17-inches. The notebook comes standard with a built-in TV tuner, DVR capabilities and a high-quality QosmioEngine that enables increased video and graphics performance. It also includes SRS WOW & TruSurround XT technology and large harman/kardon stereo speaker. It also comes with Intel Pentium M Processor 735 (1.70GHz, 2MB L2 cache) 512MB RAM (which you will presumably upgrade) and 80GB drive and tons of USB 2 ports + integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
One concern - it only supports a 1024x768 resolution and while that is great for TV quality viewing, it is a bit low for just plain old laptop usage. The other concern is that while the specs on the laptop are great, Windows MCE typically requires a >2.5GHz processor to work well. Like I have mentioned before, when I installed MCE on a <2GHz machine with 512MB RAM, it basically crawled. So we will have to wait for benchmarks to see how it performs. Anyways, it will be available for $2699 which seems like a really good price for a laptop loaded with such goodies. Nice.
