Slashdot Mirror
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 :("
That sucker looks HUGE, and yet they still haven't put a numeric keypad on it. What's the deal with that?
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
Is four retractable legs on the underneath, and you could have yourself a carry-round table, where your meals would never get cold (as long as the laptop was switched on).
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
yeah well, do you really think you get your money's worth having to carry around the EXTRA 5 lb of the Toshiba (Apple weight: 5.4 pounds, Toshiba weight: 10 pounds)
Without the damned session in the URL:
Here
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.
Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
Sager has a 17" notebook that has been on powernotebooks.com for a little while now:
http://www.powernotebooks.com/products.php3?displa y_size=17
Well, as a desktop replacement, this unit will probably be pretty capable. It would be ideal for a primary office machine that you could take home from time to time and on occasional business trips. However, if it were to be carried on frequent trips or taken home every day, an ultraportable with a docking station would be a better bet.
"Want in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up first." - My Dad
I was able to get to it from their main page...
Portables->Satellite->P25
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.
It's a floor wax. It's a dessert topping. It's both!
Don't say 10 ~pounds~, say JUST A HINT OVER 4.5 kg.
blarg.
If you don't need a DVD burner, it might be better to get this one for $1555:
powernotebooks
(I don't work for them, and I would never buy one. I'm just suggesting an alternative).
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
Does this mean i can finally call my full tower - 19'' CRT monitor - plus Laserjet 2100 , computer a Laptop without people laughing? Hurray!
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
OK, so you could lug around a TEN pound Toshiba or a 6.8 pound Apple. When I am travelling on business and need a portable workstation, I know which one I want. Three lbs is a huge difference when it comes to cross country flights.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
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?
Sure it's as big as an Apple, but it's not comparable in some aspects. First, it's heavier by almost twice (10 lbs vs 5.4 lbs) and it has less than half the battery life (2.0 hrs vs 4.5 hrs) It's a nice first try.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It is a standard size, just not one you recognize because you don't work in the film industry editing 16x9 video.
Now with 50% greater weenie roasting surface area.
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.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I still don't get why go up in size and then barely go up in resolution.
while you claim that 1440x900 is "nice" - I can get 1400x1050 on my 15" screen of my laptop right now. And I currently don't like it - I want one of the new laptops that can do more than that -there are plenty of laptops out there that go higher. I want to be able to fit more on my screen - not just have everything look bigger.
Why do you go up in screen size but not increase the resolution? I don't see what the point is.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Apple weight: 5.4 pounds
Uh no, the 17" Apple weighs in at 6.8 lbs.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
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
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
This introduction of 17 laptops is just an adoption of SUV culture where bigger is supposedly better. My boss who is a mac fanatic, picked up a 17in powerbook not long after it came out. I haven't seen him bring it out once yet, he still uses his older 800mhz 15 with a big crack in the ti case. The 17 is simply a monster to carry and I know Mac fanboys will blab on about how companies are copying Apple's "innovations" but sticking a 17in LCD in a laptop is not innovation, its a step back.
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).
CPU performance may also vary from specifications due to design configuration.
Under some conditions, your computer product may automatically shut- down. This is a normal protective feature designed to reduce the risk of lost data or damage to the product when used outside recommended conditions. To avoid risk of lost data, always make back-up copies of data by periodically storing it on an external storage medium. For optimum performance, use your computer product only under recommended conditions. Read additional restrictions under "Environmental Conditions" in your product Resource Guide. Contact Toshiba Technical Service and Support for more information.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Well, the laptop percentage went up because the absolute number of desktop sales was going way way down. Apple's machines were stuck at at 166 MHz FSB, and otherwise weren't much faster than machines that were a year or so old.
Now that the Freaking Awesome G5 machines are about to be released, the absolute number of desktop sales should increase massively, reducing the laptop percentage. With the new machines shipping in September or so, I'd expect that Apples 2003H2 laptop sales to drop to 20% or something (while still showing reasonable growth in absolute numbers).
My video compression blog
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.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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)
PHB: "Have you seen the new Apple laptops? They've got 17" screens! What are we doing to counteract this?"
Engineers: "Well, we have been working on it for a while sir. It only seemed to be the next step."
PHB: "When will it be ready?"
Engineers: "Given the current status, we have to redesign some things to accomodate for the power and size. Maybe two years."
PHB: "Two years! We need this out by next summer! And make it as powerful as possible. We need to beat out anybody else on power."
Engineers: "But what about battery life? If we use mobile Pentiums and use Intel's Centrino specs, we could save on power--"
PHB: "I want MORE power."
Engineers: "But, it'll weigh a ton. Laptops are supposed to be light."
PHB: "La la la. Not listening. Just make it have a 17" screen and make it more powerful."
Engineers: "Okay, we'll do it."
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I have a Toshiba Satellite 5105-S607, and it's got a 15" screen that can do 1600x1200. This 17" does 1400x900? Strikes me as very odd that it's got a LOWER resolution, unless they're using a lowered-bitprint LCD to keep costs down. It would be interesting to see if they go to a higher resolution screen in a few months with a higher price.
I also miss the cPad that my S607 has - the touchpad has a small LCD under it that can be used for things like changing the logo under it, as well as used as a keypad, a calculator, a signature capture device and (with a download) a theramin simulator. It's sufficiently odd as to be very amusing, and can be very useful in some situations.
Brazil has decided you're cute.
It looks like they caught and surpassed apple in this case.
The Toshiba would be clearly better except for the fact that the it is 3lbs heavier, has no support for 802.11g or bluetooth, is bigger in every dimension, has a tray loading drive, has no L3 cache (vs 1MB DDR on the PB), no built-in mic, 10/100 enet (vs 10/100/1000), one FireWire 400 port (vs 1 FW 800 and 1 FW 400) and less than half the battery life.
Where the Toshiba actually is better:
Price. It is expandable to 2GB Ram while the PB maxes out at 1GB. It has a bigger L2 cache (512k vs 256k). It also burns CD-Rs twice as fast (but not CD-RWs)
Unfortunately, unlike the PB, you can't buy it with any empty ram slots. You are stuck with those useless 256MB sticks if you want to upgrade. Heck, you can't even change the ram at all before purchase.
IIRC, the Pentiums used in laptops have to scale way down to meet even their meager battery life estimates, so the Mac will even be faster for non-altivec tasks. I may be wrong on this point, but the rest stands.
Oh, and the Mac has that oh-so-cool glowing keyboard with ambient light sensor.
t'nera semordnilap
Lower speed drives are nessesary in laptop computers because the drives have a tendancy to be jarred much more often than a desktop drive.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984