Toshiba Unveils Laptop With Instant-On TV & DVR

Patik writes "Toshiba has unveiled a new laptop, Qosmio, that allows users to watch TV or a DVD without booting the OS. The laptop turns on instantly for these functions and has a 15" near-TV quality screen. To use DVR functions like time shifting and recording, the user must boot the Windows Media Center OS."

Comments

uh oh.

[torpor]

This is an interesting dis-info exercise. People think "OS = Microsoft".

It is "not booting -the- OS", no. Its not booting "Windows OS".

There -is- an OS being loaded, just that its only going to support Toshiba's Apps... and nobody elses.

Not quite so nice

[LiquidCoooled]

Its only got half the functionality.

Consider yourself turning this thing on and watching, you get carried away and want to record something.

You have to reboot, LOAD WINDOWS, start the tv thingy and get recording.

from the article:

If users want to pause live TV or record TV shows onto the 80-gigabyte hard disk, however, they'll need to do so with the Windows software.

Re:15" near-TV quality screen

[ComaVN]

Think viewing angle and refreshrate/fade

Re:Wow!

[torpor]

Why do they need to catchup? I very rarely turn my systems off, they're sleeping in low-power mode pretty much most of the time, and everything is available to me whenever I need it.

This "Not-An-OS" hack/trick of Toshiba is a way to get away Windows' (The OS) horrific boot-loading/suspend/power-management stability issue.

In OSX, no such problem exists: the system is stable, and manages its power in such a way that it need not interfere with instant-on operation.

Why widescreen laptops?

[oshy]

Why are laptops going widescreen? Shouldnt PCs be streaching the other way.

Lets take an example of some poor sod using MSOffice

They have the task bar down the bottom.
They may have a scrolling news bar across the top.
The will have menu bars at the top of word.
All sorts of tool bars docked with the menu.
What way up to we normally edit a page? Portrait, not landscape.

I saw a secerterys PC once that had so many extra toolbars, that using Word was like working through a letterbox.

Re:Why widescreen laptops?

[TheRaven64]

I don't know about you, but I am a member of the species homo sapiens. We have two eyes on the front of our heads giving two horizontally overlapping fields of vision. These are interpreted by the brain and stitched together to give a field of view that is considerably wider than it is high. A laptop screen (or a desktop screen, for that matter) that is wider than it is tall fits in our field of vision better than on that is taller.

Now, consider the UI I usually interact with:

OS X dock on the right hand side of the screen.
Menu bar at the top (no clutter by having visible menu bars for inactive windows. Easier target to hit according to Fitt's law.)
Document window the height of the screen.
Tool pallets floating around it.
Preview window floating next to it.

When using something like LaTeX (or even editing HTML) widescreen is very useful, since you can have a preview window and an editing window on screen next to each other at the same time. The same is true of writing code, since it is possible to put a code window and a document window on screen next to each other easily.

Near-TV quality means...

[argent]

Brightness, contrast, color accuracy and stability, viewing angle, there's a lot more than pixel size and area to a screen.

TV / laptop combinations

[davejenkins]

Combining a TV with a notebook is a big point here in Japan. Many young people live in single room apartments (literally 15 sq metre boxes) where space is at an extreme premium. As such, many just cannot afford the space of having both a computer monitor and a television.

Dell Japan offers TV tuners for their desktops only in Japan. All the Japanese manufacturers (Fujitsu, Toshiba, NEC, Hitachi, Sony, et al) pack TV tuners in their machines as defaults. Toshiba has made the jump by avoiding the 20-seconds of boot-up time when someone just wants to watch the latest episode of Gundam reruns...

While we're on the subject of japanese notebooks, the US notebooks suck in terms of case design and overall size/weight.

Instant-on isn't anything new

[drewhearle]

"Instant-on" PCs aren't new. Take a look at the Soyo SY-P4VAL version M (I think this was on Slashdot before but I don't have a link). The built-in BIOS "media center" software lets you play MP3 CDs, audio CDs, VCDs, DVDs, and watch TV. It's only ~$130, as opposed to $2500 - $2600.
Granted, this article is about a laptop with instant-on capabilities, which is of course cooler and more expensive.

Re:Wow!

[scrm]

There's some speculation that the all-new Apple iMac G5 (announced for September) will include TV functionality

I think this would rock, as it's rather a waste to have those nice wide LCD screens off at any time (that and the fact that my apartment is of the aforementioned shoebox type).

Re:"15" near-TV quality screen"

[Phreakiture]

regular tv is 800x600 hdtv is 1024x768

Wrong!

Regular TV is nX480, where n is determined by available analogue bandwidth, or by the defined digital value, whichever is less. If composite video is involved, n is less than 300, with colour resolution less than 150. If the narrowest analog link is S-Video, then image resolution may be as high as you can muster, but colour resolution is less constrained to about 400 pixels. Component can go as high as you want.

Digital modes include 352x240 (0.1 megapixels; VCD), 352x480 (0.2 megapixels; TiVo), 480x480 (0.2 megapixels; SVCD), 640x480 (0.3 megapixels; DTV/VGA), 704x480 (0.3 megapixels; DTV) and 720x480 (0.3 megapixels; DV/DVD). Note that in no case does X approach 800 nor Y approach 600. 800x600 would be 0.5 megapixels.

Now, if you've been paying attention, you've noticed that VCD is not nX480, byt nX240. To present this on an NTSC monitor, either each line is repeated, or the picture is scaled and smoothed, depending on your playback hardware.

HDTV, on the other hand, is firmly defined as 1280x720 (0.9 megapixels) or 1920x1080 (2.1 megapixels), both higher than 1024x768 (0.8 megapixels).