Toshiba Qosmio: TV or Laptop?

• December 21st, 2007 | General

Convergence continues to blur the line between devices with Toshiba’s Qosmio G40 multimedia laptop. Already, Toshiba has the Qosmio G45-AV680 which is almost as good. Both laptops come stacked with some amazing multimedia bells and whistles on top of a pretty impressive set of specs for a laptop. For starters, the G45 comes with a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo processor, 2 gigs of memory, 320 gigs of hard drive space and a recordable optical drive. All, perfectly reasonabledeets by today’s standards. But the features that make the G45 worth the $3000 price tag just might blow your mind.

To begin, the laptop features a somewhat predictable 17 inch display featuring “WUXGA with Ultimate TruBrite® Technology”. That’s definitely cool for a multimedia laptop. However, what does adding HD DVD recordability to that optical drive do for you? How about throwing in an HD TV Tuner? How about Bluetooth, 5 USB ports, webcam, remote, fingerprint reader, iLink, an S-Video output and an HDMI output? Yeah, pretty impressive huh? That’s all on the G45–the newer, better G40 has two TV tuners, a 2.2Ghz processor and a 400 gig hard drive.

While Toshiba has the G45 available right now on their website for $3000, currently, and sadly, the G40 looks to be only available in Japan and will run you around $3500 if you were to buy it there. Hopefully, the price will drop at least a little when it reaches Western shores. The thing to note with theQosmio line of Toshiba laptops is that the TV and the computer have merged to create a whole new type of multimedia device. That’s the very concept of “convergence,” where, slowly but surely, devices are merging into one.

Source: AkihabaraNews