Toshiba Introduces A 17"-Screen Laptop

George Wright writes "Toshiba have announced a monster of a laptop with their Satellite P25. Seems they've decided to copy Apple's idea of fitting a 17" LCD on a laptop, but have ended making a true aircraft carrier in doing so. Notable "features" are the 2.8GHz P4, the 802.11a/b and the 10lb weight (!!!). Still a relatively low resolution though :("

Comments

Erm...why?

[BluRBD!E]

I don't understand technology movements these days. Laptops have saturated the market. Most people want a faster/quiter/cheaper home pc, yet no companies seem to be interested in this option. Then again, the majority of home pc's are still slow pentium 1/2 or celerons, as that's all most mums and dads need. Why aren't companies like Dell, Toshiba, HP etc... improving these? I understand a lot of it is out of their hands (hardware size etc...) but still... PS...First post :P

Re:Erm...why?

[Alan Partridge]

No, you're right, there are hardly any good games for the Mac - but why would you need them when you can buy consoles for such a pittance? I still have a dream that one day Nintendo (or Sony) will do an NGC(or PS2)-on-a-card system and I'll be able to pop it into my Powermac and blaze away merrily, but it hardly seems likely.

As it stands, Powermac + Playstation 2 = have your cake and eat it.

Re:Erm...why?

[*weasel]

my pocket prognosticater says that tablets and their variants are the future.

the pen interface is way more intuitive than the keyboard for most people - and the majority of people's use of the computer doesn't really require a full keyboard/mouse. not when you consider how well the tablets do handwriting recognition nowadays (unless you have 2nd grade handwriting).

having to open the clamshell and support the box on a surface or your knees is unnecessary now. fighting with the eraser-nubby style mouse pointer or short-lived touchpads is gone as well. the cumbersome aspects of the laptop go the way of the cumbersome aspects of the desktop.

now if only i could play unreal 2k3 on it...

Re:Erm...why?

[jo_ham]

If you ever want to upgrade that laptop you have, replace it with a 12" iBook; you won't be disappointed.

My story is the same as yours, but I moved from a Win2k desktop to a 12", 600Mhz iBook that became my primary machine. It goes with me everywhere, does everything I ask of it (even editing a short video while I was on the road and didn't have access to our Final Cut Pro machine).

It's bombproof - solidly built and with no ports or doors sticking out. It feels sturdy and has survived a drop onto the floor.

I upgraded the internal hard drive at the beginning of the year since, having become my primary machine, I needed more than the 20Gb of space that it came with. At some point I'll probably stick that 20Gb drive in a firewire case to use externally, but for now the internal space has been upped to 40Gb and I can tell that this thing is just going to keep going and going tirelessly until Apple stops making batteries that fit (the Lithium Ion battery is just about the only thing inside the case with less than a 5 year life).

We only just retired a 9600/300, replacing it with a Beige G3 at work. I can see this trusty little iBook serving me will long into the future. If Apple is still making iBooks in 5 years time I'll probably buy another one to replace it rather than a powerbook - the iBook is fantastic value for money.

21" laptop

[nbarr]

The next step: The 21" laptop.

People keep innovating until technology is completely useless. Then they go back, and settle for the things that are usable.

This look like: I have a bigger xxx than you have!! Biggest car, biggest house, biggest whatever. But who needs a 200 room house if he lives alone? Some thing for laptops. Who needs 17" to carry around? You only need a screen that big in the office/home, and there, you could connect the laptop to a decent LCD monitor.

What happened to WYSIWYG?

[crimguy]

Seems that all laptops that come out these days have weird resolutions that have no bearing on how your text will be outputted to a printer. This one will have text that is too large onscreen, while others (Dell is particularly guilty of this) have super-hi res screens where everything is too small. Back when I was a Mac guy (13 years ago) having WYSIWYG was important to most users, but no one appears to care any more.

17" Screens

[TheKey]

People act like these are firsts. I remember seeing 17" screens for awhile back from small unheard of laptop manufacterers.

Crap that rez sucks

[Cthefuture]

1440x900 WTF? Toshiba has a huge flop on their hands.

Although I haven't seen it (page is dead), it sounds bulkly (10 lbs?!). But the absolute kicker is that resolution. A 17" (!) screen that only does 1440x900?! Oh man that sucks.

My 15" Dell is running at 1600x1200 right now (and looks wonderful). Ah, love that UXGA. Toshiba made a huge mistake.

Laptop screen resolution

[aziraphale]

okay, what gives with laptop manufacturers and screen resolutions? I've got a 12.1" XGA screen on my laptop, and it has a physical dot pitch of about 105DPI. This monster screen has a dot pitch around 95DPI, if that. I've seen 10" XGA screens which have beautiful crisp pixels (you're talking about 128DPI on those things - Toshiba used to make a laptop with one, in fact). If you built a 17" widescreen TFT with the same dot pitch as one of those, you'd be looking at a laptop with some 1800x1100 pixels. That would be worth doing. But it seems as TFTs get larger, the resolution gets lower, and we end up with beautiful screens like the Apple cinema displays being let down by the fact that their pixels are huge.

Why would I want a laptop with a bigger screen than my 12.1" one if I don't actually get that many more pixels?

Re:Market

[SomeOtherGuy]

Exactly what is the market for a Laptop like this?

Good point. In the business world (biggest purchasers of laptops I think), laptops are usually used from hotel rooms and airport lobbies. Having been in this situation for over 10 years now, where email, web applications, power point presentations, etc -- make up the bulk of the reasons why I carry the thing around the country -- I have a hard time seeing why anyone would want something any bigger than the smallest possible option. I could use a variety of these "new fangled" laptops to work on my presentation's in airport lounges, but I still choose to use an "old/slow (400 Mhz Cely)" IBM TP 240 at 2.9 lbs. I may give up the bells and whistles, but it sure beats lugging around a 6-10 lb. monster around the country.

Re:And still

[rblancarte]

As opposed to now?

I don't know about you, but most people I know orient their keyboard so that the whole keyboard (keyboard and keypad) are centered against the monitor, not just the main keyboard. Call it an aesthetics thing. That doesn't even consider the fact that most keyboards are already off centered to the left to a small degree already.

I have to agree with the first post, if you have that much real estate to work with, why not have a keypad on there. Hell, why not just dump the whole small keyboard footprint and go with a full 104 on there?

You aren't the target customer for this machine

[Man_Holmes]

I've got a Toshiba Satellite 1955 laptop with a 16 inch screen and I adore it.

I've got a small software company and spend four months a year on the road. I've got a back pack case and the 10 lbs is no problem going through airports etc.

It's a great machine for doing presentations. Not too bad for writing code either.

I would carry a 19 inch screen laptop if I could buy it from a major manufacturer.

Man Holmes

RAM, RAM, RAM

[intermodal]

you don't understand it? I don't see why. There's no real innovation to be had these days for joe sixpack.

Mom and dad can get to their hotmail account and check their stocks just fine on their pentium II (or even pentium 1...my wife's grandparents only upgraded because lightning fried their modem and screwed up their motherboard). Usually all they need is an operating system reinstall or a larger hard drive since they aren't capable of actually cleaning out their files themselves.

Saying that most people want faster computers is primarily the fault of Microsoft (flamebait, blah blah) wanting to up the number of features at the expense of speed, as well as these users not knowing how to defrag or that they should get rid of the dozens of things running in their system tray. And let's not forget Longhorn's aspirations towards 3d-accelerated desktops. Something Joe User simply doesn't need but will "have to have" once he hears about it. That and upgrading their RAM.

Saying that most people want quieter computers is the responsibility of chipmakers, not of OEMs. Put a Pentium 4 or Athlon XP into a box and it's gonna have fans. No question. Put a Crusoe or a C3 into a box for grandma, and you might even be able to go fanless if you do it right. But she wants that Pentium 4 the TV told her she had to have.

As far as cheaper goes, as long as mom and pop are buying from OEMs like Dell and Gateway, it's not gonna happen.

Personally, as far as desktops go, I think it'd be far more beneficial for people to stop looking at megahertz or gigahertz. A 1.2 GHz Athlon with 1GB of RAM is going to run faster than a 2.4 GHz pentium 4 with 128 MB of RAM for someone who doesn't realize he has 200MB of programs running in his system tray alone. When I build PCs from scratch these days, I do whatever I can to put a bare minimum of a half gig of RAM, preferrably a full gig. Why? Because modern software is bloated, and because average users don't do anything to help the situation. You can try to teach them.

But trust me on the RAM. it's honestly all the average non-technical person who wants to have a computer for internet and word processing needs to upgrade if their current system is 300mhz or higher

Re:there are other 17" notebooks available too

[AssFace]

and one of the bays is just a fricken subwoofer - as if I care about that on my laptop.

in terms of batter life, it is going to be hard to get good battery life from a 17" screen - that is just a lot of power that it has to supply and I imagine paritially why the resolution still is a bit crappy on the 17" ones - to increase the resolution would have to increase the actual screen density of pixels, which would then require more power... and it is already a power hog as it is.

That site is pretty cool though, never knew it existed.

Well.

[mindstrm]

I had a big toshiba.. not quite this big.. but the satellite 5100 series... big enough as far as laptops go. Hardly fit in most laptop bags. Weighted a ton. High res screen, fast, etc.

I wanted it becuase it was powerful, and big, and beat out a lot of desktops I encountered in daily work.. and I could easily take it home, or to work.

And yes, it sucked for trips. Too big for an aircraft tray table, bulky, heavy, and the battery life was less than stellar.

I say past tense, cause my car got stolen, along with my laptop. So... being the eternal optimist, the bright side was I had the perfect excuse to buy a new computer.

So I bought a 12" iBook (which I'm not completely in love with, thank you Apple) and I'm determined NOT to have a huge, bulky laptop again. There is something about being able to use a little laptop for 4 hours straight without realizing you forgot to plug it in that seems... right.

Bigger is not always better...

[chill]

Last month I was flying cross-country (SouthWest Airlines) and a couple sitting across the aisle from me both pulled out brand new Titanium Powerbooks w/17" screens.

They were awful proud of their laptops and made disparaging comments about my "cute little toy" -- a Fujitsu Lifebook P2120. I was then subjected to a prosetylization sermon that would have done the Jehovas Witnesses proud.

It was my turn when BOTH of them tried to use those behemoths at the same time -- on the fold down trays in economy class, right next to each other.

Those beasts, while pretty, can't be used in economy class airline seats without seriously annoying the person sitting next to you. They're too big.

All they were doing was answering e-mails (offline), checking their calendar -- mostly showing off the new toys and attempting to spread the gospel of St. Steve.

Once I got the point across that I didn't WANT a big screen on a laptop, but preferred a lighter weight (3.5 lbs) and longer battery life (10+ hours with my secondary battery), they left me alone. It also helped that I wasn't running any version of Windows.

Why are 17" PC Notebooks heavier than MACs?

[VisualVoice]

Can any Slashdot PC Hardware engineers enlighten us to the sorry state of PC notebook design? Why is this notebook 10lbs, and Apple can design one 3 lbs lighter? Why do PC Notebook components require 3 extra lbs!?? Also why can't PC laptop manufacturers start using DVD/CD Rom drives that do not have a disk tray (e.g. just insert the disk into a slot like the Apple Powerbook)

Re:Why are 17" PC Notebooks heavier than MACs?

[precogpunk]

My girlfriend was in a car crash with her titanium powerbook and despite the screen being broken and the case being cracked the thing still works. Her car, however, was completely totaled.

Re:there are other 17" notebooks available too

[drunk_as_in_beer]

I like the fact that they actually use the extra space for a numeric pad on the keyboard, whereas the Toshiba just wastes the extra space.

Re:And still

[Anonymous Coward]

yup, i dont get it, a laptop is supposed to give you flexibilty over anything else , so the manufacter has to compromize with just the right things to produce the ultimate machine, and if apple could just get the 12" powerbook down to an 1" when folded and fit something like the 970 in it, atleast i would stop looking for a year or so..

oh, and it's uggly to, almost as uggly as the 17" apple counterpart. shame on you toshiba.

What's vaio doing nowadays anyway ?

Re:And still

[Morgahastu]

That configuration may work on a desktop but imagine that on a laptop.

Go on, do it.

You'd be offsetting the laptop on your lap. Either that or position your hands in a very uncomfortable manner to reach the main keys on the left side of the laptop.

When you use a laptop on your laptop you often end up balancing it on your knees by putting your hands on it. With your hands mostly on the left side that won't work out too well, especially with a bohemoth 17" laptop that sticks off your lap.

A full size keyboard just wouldn't be comfortable.

Re:You are mistaken. The altitude is given in feet

[Hes Nikke]

the full quote goes
CPU performance in your computer product may vary from specifications under the following conditions:
use of certain external peripheral products
use of battery power instead of AC power
use of certain multimedia games or videos with special effects
use of standard telephone lines or low speed network connections
use of complex modeling software, such as high end computer aided design applications
use of computer in areas with low air pressure (high altitude >1,000 meters or >3,280 feet above sea level)
use of computer at temperatures outside the range of 5C to 35C (41F to 95 F) or >25C (77F) at high altitude (all temperature references are approximate).

i like the battery power, and software bits myself...

"yeah, the CPU runs at 2.8 GHz, but as soon as you load an OS*, it reduces itself to 1.7 GHz"

*some people would say that Windows XP counts as "multimedia games or videos with special effects"