toshiba

Amid all the laptop news this week, much of it coming out of the IFA show, there were a few announcements that especially stood out: two major PC makers unveiled their entries in the new (and untested) Ultrabook category. Even better, we got a change to get our hands on working demo units of both models, the Lenovo IdeaPad U300s and the Toshiba Portege Z830. Those two new models join previously announced Ultrabooks such as the Asus UX21.

The Toshiba Portege Z830 has a strong lineage as a successor of sorts to the very popular Portege R835, which is one … Read more

BERLIN--Critics rightly gripe about the annoyance of wearing glasses to watch 3D video, but Toshiba believes now is the time to move engineering prototypes for no-glasses 3D to the market.

At the IFA show here, the Japanese electronics company unveiled its new 55LZ2, a large-screen 55-inch TV that can be viewed from a wide range of angles in 3D.

3D works by showing separate views to the left and right eyes; the brain reconstructs the 3D world from the two images. Toshiba's TV uses numerous tiny lenses to direct two different views in slightly different directions so each eye sees something different. That's easier to do with a single viewer at a fixed distance to the screen, but harder with multiple viewers. Toshiba's 55LZ2 divides the overall viewing area into nine separate regions so people can use the 3D over a broad range of angles. … Read more

Apple, evidently, has a lot of employees with drinking problems, and it keeps letting those employees take iPhone prototypes out of the building. Really? Wow, dudes. Also, T-Mobile tries to pump up its employees over the merger situation, you can finally legally play Doom in Germany, tablet makers try everything but the easy solution, and China is going to kill us all. Or give us $99 tablets, hard to say. And Buzz Out Loud is getting out of the daily deals business.

BERLIN--Toshiba, trying again to gain a foothold in the tablet market, introduced the AT200 Android tablet today, a Honeycomb-powered model with a 10.1-inch screen.

The tablet, like Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1, has a screen resolution of 1280x800. It's 7.7mm thick and the Wi-Fi-only model weighs 558 grams--measurements Toshiba is very excited about as a sales pitch.

"People like thin and light," said Steve Crawley, Toshiba's senior manager for tablet product development, at the IFA electronics show here. Toshiba boasts that's the thinnest and lightest for a tablet in its screen size. … Read more

It's a big week for laptops, thanks to the IFA going on in Europe right now, and Toshiba's addition is the Portege Z830 series. Toshiba says the system is part of Intel's new ultrabook platform, and at first glance it shares some common traits with the Lenovo IdeaPad U300s we saw earlier in the week.

The Portege Z830 has a magnesium alloy case and weighs around 2.5 pounds and is 0.6 inches thick -- Toshiba says that's about 20-percent lighter and 40-percent thinner than the Portege R835, which is one of our favorite current … Read more

Toshiba isn't the first name you think of when it comes to Blu-ray, but the former backer of the now-dead HD-DVD format currently offers a full line of 11 Blu-ray players. The BDX5200 is one of the company's midrange models, offering built-in Wi-Fi, 3D compatibility, and a modest suite of streaming-media services, including Netflix, Pandora, and Vudu. It's also currently available at a bit of a discount compared with other midrange Blu-ray players, with a street price under $140.

That will save you some extra cash compared with our top-rated midrange players like the Panasonic DMP-BDT210 and … Read more

All the excitement these days may be centered around supersmall laptops, from ultraportable to ultrathin to ultrabook, but there's still a place for PCs on the opposite end of the spectrum. There are few things more fun for a laptop reviewer than unpacking and setting up a massive 17- or 18-inch desktop replacement laptop. To be fair, many of these systems hardly qualify to be called laptops at all; some are so massive, and have such poor battery life, that you'll essentially set them up once and never move them again.

We've had a bit of a … Read more

There are a lot of minicamcorders on the market, but not all of them can withstand a 5-foot drop or a dunk in a pool. And actually, last year you really couldn't find any that could survive those things. This year, though, you can pick from models from Kodak, Panasonic, Toshiba, JVC, GE, and Samsung.

The leaders here are Kodak's PlaySport Zx5 and Panasonic's HM-TA20. The Panasonic is more expensive than and isn't as full featured as the PlaySport, but it's still less than $200 and does just enough. It also seems better designed for … Read more

This week: Toshiba's glasses-free 3D laptop has gone from prototype to release in record time; we pick our favorite back-to-school systems; and the World Wide Web hits 20 years old. The gang ponders the recent success of Xbox Live games such as Fruit Ninja Kinect and Bastion, and we take an informal poll on Google Plus and Spotify use.

Special guests this week are TJ Allard and Josh Goldman. You may remember TJ as one of Dan's co-panelists on the cult favorite video game shows Play Value and Best Game Ever. Check out some old Play Value episodes on YouTube, and we've embedded one below for kicks.

Bonus: Download the show's jaunty theme song as a free MP3 here.

… Read more