You know how China is a land of freedom in terms of copyright laws, with all those small brands copying Nokia phones and iPhones with the sole consequence of making (good) money. Now how about a big brand copying another big brand, this time being staged in the land of Japan? Jump for more drama.
In an announcement made to calm anxious business men and XP fans alike, Toshiba has announced that they will be shipping their Satellite T31 notebook with both XP and Vista included in the box. While most of you will only install one of these OS’s, we assume that installing both on partitions is possible.
The T31 will ship in two core packages, one including a 1.86GHz Celeron M system with 512MB of memory, an 80GB hard drive, and a DVD/CD-RW combo drive for the US equivalent of $1,565, with an upgraded package shipping with a faster 2GHz Core 2 Duo processor and a newer mainboard platform, which will ship for around $1,850. It’s cool that they will be offering both XP and Vista, but I’m still waiting on the day for a fully compatible Mac-Windows computer, with full DirectX compatibility. — Andrew Dobrow
It was only a matter of time before Sony announced that the cheaper, stripped down European version of the PS3 would make its way to the States–and it appears that today was the day. Specifically, the official announcement revealed that a 40GB PS3 with half the USB ports, no multi-format card reader, and no backwards compatibility will be available in the US starting on November 2nd for $399. This will coincide with a price drop on the 80GB PS3 from $599 to $499.
Damn, where did I put that remote? Sounds familiar right? Add a few more explicit words in there and you have an average day in my living room. It would be nice not to have to fumble around for the remote anymore, sorry Mr. Adler, may you rest in peace.
Toshiba has been developing a laptop-based camera gadget called “SpursEngine”, shown at CEATRC, which can detect motion and interpret these gestures to control a DVD player or even 3D graphic displays. The camera can see gestures made from up to 10 feet away, and means no more lost remotes, unless you lose your hands in a freak accident or something. — Andrew Dobrow
We in Asia have to wait till 2007 for the iPhone to arrive, the recent report from FCC has shattered dreams of millions since the widgets were to be substituted by Cingular’s monopolistic services for the mean time, the sole support for 850 and 1900Mhz would make parallel import (or roaming) to most parts of the world impossible.
The Japanese aren’t waiting, so they wrote an iPhone theme for their super high-end Toshiba 911T phone… and unfortunately the whole package does look a lot more attractive than the iPhone itself. Think about it, a 3″ W-VGA screen (800×480 pixels), One-Seg DMB tuner, HSDPA support, a microSD slot with support up to 2GB (plus 1GB internal memory you get 3GB), a battery that lasts more than 40 minutes, an anti-shake 3.2MP camera with autofocus, removable battery (thank god), Microsoft Office and Adobe PDF document reader, bluetooth A2DP supporting streaming to HiFis, a slider with a real keypad, 3 shiny color variations… we can also pick up the Oakley A2DP sunglasses with headphones. If you live in Japan, forget about the darn iPhone. –Sam Chan
Prototypes are meant to be attractive, right? They’re supposed attract buyers to look into the company’s new technology. Toshiba might has just done the opposite with their fuel-cell technology. (fuel, being alcohol) We’ve seen fuel-cell driven notebooks and even Gigabeat MP3 players, but by far the most unattractive would be this: the A2DP headphones. Ok, fine, probably it doesn’t really look that bad, but quoting their own words, the development issues are cost, size and durability. For once we are not sure if we really want to see this prototype commercialized, no thank you. One more pic after the jump, see if that can change your mind.
Are you completely sick and tired of hearing about the constant battle between what companies are supporting Blu-ray or HD-DVD? Well, even though toshiba is decidedly HD-DVD, they have just released two DVD or HDD players. In interesting part (and a disadvantage to some) is that they have no support for either Blu-ray or HD-DVD.
The two models are named the RD-S600 and the RS-S300. So what do they offer instead of next-gen DVD tech? They offer huge hard drives. The 600 and the 300 offer 600GB and 300GB drives, respectively. They have DVD burners, an HDMI port, and and upscale your content to 720p/1080i video. No price released yet, but those hard drives won’t be cheap. — Nik Gomez
2 new Toshiba media recorders [Akihabara news]
Softbank announced the Toshiba 812T Kotomobile (Kid’s phone) this morning. First off it runs on WCDMA network, has a pretty good 3.2MP camera, a music player that supports microSD cards up to 1GB, and there’re also comic characters for wallpaper and screensavers. The part that is the most easy to spot would be the ring attached to the phone. When ever you are in danger (for example seeing a scary kindergarten teacher), pull that ring and the super loud buzzer will be activated, a video-call will be automatically dialed to your parents and your location information (GPS) will also be sent. Parents can even trace your kids on the computer whenever they want. The 812T will be out in February. — Sam Chan
Looks like the latest trend in Japan is to go for shiny phones, Softbank announced 3 more shiny phones this morning, one from each of NEC, Panasonic and Toshiba. All these phones runs on W-CDMA in Japan and GSM triband when being roamed elsewhere. Cameras on 706N and 706P are 2 megapixels whereas the one on 813T is 3.2MP. The rest of the specs are pretty much standard: QVGA screens, microSD slot, bluetooth, music player, HTML browser… so it’ll be up to personal preference to decide between the trio, perhaps the different user interface. They will all be on shelves before March. — Sam Chan
Softbank announces today their strongest ever multimedia phone, the 911T manufactured by Toshiba. This slider houses a 3″ W-VGA screen (480×800 pixels) in its 17.9mm thin sliding body (4mm thinner than the Toshiba W52T slider, 51×112x17.9mm 142g). The phone runs on Softbank’s 3.6Mbps HSDPA network, receives One-Seg digital TV service, comes with Bluetooth A2DP profile so you can connect your stereo headphones wirelessly, you can also stream music to supported bluetooth HiFi’s. Toshiba has partnered Oakley to design a pair of sunglasses with stereo bluetooth headphones on it, these cool looking glasses will come with the phone as you buy it, so be prepared to pay for quite a bit. The camera is a 3.2 megapixel CMOS with autofocus and anti-handshake functions; internal memory is 1GB and you con expand it with microSD up to 2GB (that’s 3GB altogether). The standard highend features such as MS Office document reader, full HTML browser and Felica electronic money chip are all built in. This mad phone will go on sale in March, expect it to be a hit. Jump for more pics.
