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Following yesterday's announcement of the Lenovo U300s ultrabook, Acer and Toshiba have thrown their hats into the ring: Acer with its Aspire S3, and Toshiba with its Portege Z830.

Let's start with the similarities: Both feature a 13.3" screen with a 1366×768 resolution, Sandy Bridge ULV processors, DDR3 memory, an HDMI port, an SD card reader, wi-fi, a webcam, and bluetooth. Both also feature SSDs of varying capacities, though the Aspire S3 will offer a higher-capacity but slower mechanical HDD option (sources indicate that HDD models will feature an embedded SSD to retain the fast boot times required by Intel's Ultrabook spec, but specifics are hard to come by). Both will also launch later this year: Toshiba is commiting to November, while Acer declined to be more specific.

And the differences: the Toshiba model also features built-in Ethernet, a VGA port, a backlit keyboard, and a third USB port, while the Acer model is slightly thinner at 0.51 inches but heavier at about 3 pounds (the Toshiba is 0.63 inches high and weighs about 2.5 pounds, though it should be noted that the weight of each model may vary based on component selection). The Toshiba will also be cheaper, starting at around ,000 (compared to the Acer's ,179).

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Looking at these early Ultrabooks, it's becoming clear that these laptops, like netbooks before them, are going to have to fight to differentiate themselves. In these particular models, this is mostly being done with ports: the Acer is the only one to lack a wired Ethernet port, while the Toshiba is the only to offer a VGA out and a third USB port.

This sort of heavy competition can be good, to a point, but I'm hoping we don't see the same thing we already see in the netbook and low-end laptop market: dozens of unexciting computers that are, for most intents and purposes, indistinguishable from one another.

Source: BusinessWire, PCMag

JAPANESE DISPLAY MAKERS Hitachi, Sony and Toshiba have decided to unload their LCD businesses into a government backed fund.

Japanese LCD firms are facing stiff competition from those based in South Korea and Taiwan, such as Samsung and AU Optronics. To defend firms such as Sony and Toshiba, which are seen as national symbols of pride in Japan, from dropping out of the market altogether, the Japanese government has created a fund that should keep some level of LCD manufacturing in Japan.

With Hitachi, Sony and Toshiba all divesting their LCD operations to this government backed fund, it could create the world’s biggest mobile LCD screen manufacturing unit. The idea is that by combining the firms it can better compete on price against its foreign rivals.

Norio Sasaki, president of Toshiba said, “Unless we have a top market share, we can’t cope flexibly with set-makers’ requests. The scale of our business is too small to grow continuously, or to remain competitive.”

The LCD market has been extremely tight in the past few years, and even well known brands such as Sony have struggled to make a go of the business. Sony acquired its LCD manufacturing technology from Seiko Epson only as recently as 2009 and the resources it will free up from the sale will go back into other components such as imaging sensors.

Bloomberg reports that even Samsung, which is the largest maker of flat-panel display screens, is looking to slim down its display division, aiming at “boosting the LCD unit’s competitiveness and stabilizing the organization”.

At this point it is difficult to say what the reduction in the number of LCD manufacturers will mean for consumers. Obviously choice is a good way of keeping end-user prices down, but given that the Japanese firms were all doing badly in the market, it seems that combining these three firms might actually provide better competition with Samsung and AU Optronics, which seem to be setting the market. µ

JAPANESE DISPLAY MAKERS Hitachi, Sony and Toshiba have decided to unload their LCD businesses into a government backed fund.

Japanese LCD firms are facing stiff competition from those based in South Korea and Taiwan, such as Samsung and AU Optronics. To defend firms such as Sony and Toshiba, which are seen as national symbols of pride in Japan, from dropping out of the market altogether, the Japanese government has created a fund that should keep some level of LCD manufacturing in Japan.

With Hitachi, Sony and Toshiba all divesting their LCD operations to this government backed fund, it could create the world’s biggest mobile LCD screen manufacturing unit. The idea is that by combining the firms it can better compete on price against its foreign rivals.

Norio Sasaki, president of Toshiba said, “Unless we have a top market share, we can’t cope flexibly with set-makers’ requests. The scale of our business is too small to grow continuously, or to remain competitive.”

The LCD market has been extremely tight in the past few years, and even well known brands such as Sony have struggled to make a go of the business. Sony acquired its LCD manufacturing technology from Seiko Epson only as recently as 2009 and the resources it will free up from the sale will go back into other components such as imaging sensors.

Bloomberg reports that even Samsung, which is the largest maker of flat-panel display screens, is looking to slim down its display division, aiming at “boosting the LCD unit’s competitiveness and stabilizing the organization”.

At this point it is difficult to say what the reduction in the number of LCD manufacturers will mean for consumers. Obviously choice is a good way of keeping end-user prices down, but given that the Japanese firms were all doing badly in the market, it seems that combining these three firms might actually provide better competition with Samsung and AU Optronics, which seem to be setting the market. µ

In the rush to move everything into the third dimension, Toshiba has announced their latest glasses-free 3D notebook, the Qosmio F755 3D. The laptop is even capable of displaying 2D and 3D content at the same time. So how does it all work?

Toshiba achieves the 3D glasses-free viewing by using the latest in auto-stereoscopic display technology. The 15.6" LCD is a full HD TruBrite panel with Active Lens technology, with double parallax technology that allows it to project two sets of images at the same time, splitting them between the left and right eyes to create the 3D effect. Toshiba’s Face Tracking technology then uses the laptop’s webcam to optimize the projection of the image by reacting to the motion and position of the viewer, delivering a broad viewing zone from which to view 3D content. The end result is the ability to view and enjoy real 3D sans no glasses.

What about simultaneous 2D and 3D content? There's nothing particularly revolutionary here; as one of the first implementations of windowed 3D content (courtesy of NVIDIA's latest drivers), users can watch 3D content in a full-screen or condense it to a smaller window, leaving the rest of the content in standard 2D mode. Like other 3D laptops, Toshiba also includes the ability to convert 2D movies into a faux-3D mode, though I've never felt that looked particularly good.

The Qosmio F755 3D comes with all the other accoutrements you'd expect from a modern high-end notebook, though the GPU is lacking if you're hoping to play games with 3D Vision enabled. The CPU is a Core i7, while graphics come in the form of the GeForce GT 540M. Storage consists of a 750GB hard drive and a Blu-ray/DVDR combo drive, and as usual Toshiba uses harman/kardon speakers to deliver improved sound quality.

The Qosmio F755 3D will be available in mid-August with a 00 MSRP at select e-tailers and ToshibaDirect.com. Pre-rendered images of the laptop are below, showing Toshiba hasn't lost their verve for glossy red exteriors.

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The regular refreshes that come from notebook vendors aren't often the stuff of exciting news. It's generally a processor update, maybe a slight change in shell design. With Toshiba's 2011 refresh that's not entirely untrue, but this year they've timed their update to coincide with the launch of AMD's Llano APU and NVIDIA's launch of the GeForce GTX 560M. Their Fusion finish is also getting a much needed update along with the top-of-the-line Qosmio. Bottom line: there's a lot going on at Toshiba.

Toshiba won't mind if we say that their previous business class notebooks looked…kind of cheap. They were bulky and unattractive, largely feeling like consumer notebooks with matte instead of glossy plastic. Yet when we visited with Toshiba to talk about their Tecra refresh, we were impressed, and Toshiba's reps were only too happy to put the new Tecras next to the old ones to demonstrate the stunning new weight loss plan the notebooks were put on. And the best part? While the Tecras have gotten a healthy refresh, their prices remain remarkably affordable. Is the 15.6" Tecra R850 the notebook you've been looking for?

JAPANESE ELECTRONICS MAKER Toshiba came to The INQUIRER towers today to give us a closer look at its Portégé R830 laptop and some insight into the PC market’s future.

Toshiba senior product manager Ken Chang showed us the R830 and dubbed it the company’s “Hero Product”, telling us, “We’ve put everything we know about a PC into this product.”

Chang told us that the R series of Toshiba laptops has six key strengths and said those are that they are thinner, lighter, faster, stronger, smarter and easier.

For starters the R830, which is priced from £949, looks very smart with its brushed magnesium alloy chassis and it’s certainly light, weighing just 1.5kg, 630g lighter than Apple’s white Macbook.

It’s suitable to compare it to the Macbook as the R830 has a 13.3in screen. We like the LED display on the Toshiba, which has 1366×768 resolution. It is also non-reflective, which might not look as glamorous as a glossy screen but provides a much better experience for the user.

Toshiba has included support for both e-SATA and USB 3.0 to cover both formats, but Chang gave us his opinion, saying, “Now that we have USB 3.0 there is no need for e-SATA.”

Mobility is where it’s at with the R830, with its size, weight and impressive hardware including an Intel Sandy Bridge Core i5 processor. Toshiba also touts a notable 10 hour battery life, which will definitely help if you’re taking the laptop out and about.

We asked Chang what he thought about the growing tablet market, which is threatening the laptop market. He answered, “Everyone wants to go and be the next Ipad and to grab a slice of this new market.”

We really like products such as the Asus Transformer that combine the content consumption strength of tablets with addressing content creation by adding something like a keyboard dock, so we asked if he thinks the laptop market will be threatened by these kinds of devices.

He told us, “You still can’t beat the input device and I can’t see that disappearing.” He backed up this claim by showing us the consistent sales figures of laptops. He also said, “Over the next six to nine months the playing field will be clearer.” And, he added, “We’re trying to pick the right horse.”

So it seems that Toshiba is taking its time before jumping into the tablet market, intending to study the market so that it can create the right device. Maybe we’ll see it announce that within the next few months. µ

Toshiba has spent the last half a decade carving out an interesting niche as a notebook manufacturer, with many consumer-grade notebooks that are ostensibly budget offerings but often feature a markedly different look and feel from the kinds of laptops vendors like Dell, HP, and Acer produce to serve this market segment. Oftentimes they can feel stylistically behind the curve, but every so often they produce a big winner as they did with their Portege R700 series.

Now, a trickle-down of style couples with modern hardware in a respectable new entrant in their venerable Satellite line: the M645. Our review unit features a shiny new Sandy Bridge mobile dual-core processor along with a healthy amount of memory, an Optimus-enabled NVIDIA GeForce 500M series GPU, and a Blu-ray combo drive, all in a reasonable 14-inch chassis. But it threatens to set you back a grand: is it worth it?

JAPANESE ELECTRONICS MAKER Toshiba has announced a glasses-free 3D laptop that will be released in July.

Toshiba says the complexly named Dynabook Qosmio T851/D8CR will be the world’s first glasses-free laptop. Unfortunately the projected release date of late July is only for Japan.

We contacted Toshiba to find out if the device will tip up in the UK, to which it replied, “this has only been announced in Japan so far, but I’ll make sure you’re made aware if we announce it in the UK”.

We don’t hold the greatest hope for a UK release anytime soon, since Toshiba’s glasses-free 3D TVs have been available in Japan since 2010 but they haven’t cropped up yet on the continent.

The Dynabook uses parallax technology to avoid the need for glasses to be able to view a 3D image. Using “face tracking” and “active lens” features the laptop can track the user’s face and recognise the position of the eyes to adjust the image accordingly.

Hopefully this will stop the current problems with the narrow viewing window found on other parallax devices such as the Nintendo 3DS.

The laptop can also display 2D content at the same time as 3D on the same screen. It achieves this using the active lens technology, which controls the polarisation of the screen.

Toshiba says, “Active Lens can be turned off and on quickly and locally, which means individual parts of the LED panel can deliver 3D images.”

Much like the line-up of laptops and TVs that we saw at Toshiba World Conference in Rome earlier this month, the Dynabook can convert 2D content to 3D in real time using a dedicated image processor called Spursengine. µ

JAPANESE COMPUTER AND ELECTRONICS MAKER Toshiba has announced a series of self-encrypting hard drives that can wipe data if security is compromised, which it claims is a world first.

The MK6461GSYG family of hard drives includes five 2.5-inch models ranging in capacity from 150GB to 640GB. They are designed for use with copiers, printers, point-of-sale systems, computers and various other IT devices.

What differentiates these drives from others on the market is self-encryption and wipe technology, which can invalidate all data on the system when the drive is removed, powered down or connected to an unauthorised system. This will prevent data from being lost or stolen, since the drive cannot leave its designated installation without triggering the wipe feature.

Toshiba has been working on its wipe technology since August of last year, developing the automatic invalidation of data when a drive is removed or powered down, but the ability to trigger a data wipe when the drive is connected to a device that has not been given authorisation is the latest development in ensuring that sensitive data is kept secret. This will allow the drive to be moved without wiping data, but restricts access to that data to authorised systems only.

This development makes data invalidation a much speedier process compared to traditional methods, which often take hours of overwriting.

Toshiba plans to add the technology into its self-branded PCs, printers and point-of-sale systems.

Samples of the self-encrypting drives will be available from the end of April, with mass production expected at the end of June. Prices have yet to be revealed. µ