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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."
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.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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.
liqbase
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.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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.
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.
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