Toshiba

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.

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A laptop is practically required equipment for today's college or high school students (and even grade school kids are getting in on the act). And with the back-to-school season currently in full swing, many laptop shoppers are hunting for a new computer, which may need to fill diverse roles, from research tool to dorm room entertainment system.

To help find the perfect system for your academic needs, we've picked our recent favorites from brick-and-mortar stores, online retailers, and build-to-order PC makers, and listed them below, grouped by price.

For this particular list, we've stuck to only laptops … Read more

On today's show, security researchers report that Anonymous and LulzSec are, if anything, just distracting us with their antics while the true threat is a years-long cyberwarfare campaign that's stolen everything from private intellectual property to high-level government secrets. So, that'll probably lead to some reasoned and logical cyber-security discussions, no? No. Also, is the Amazon App Store screwing developers, and are you finally getting what you pay for, broadband-wise?

Following Western Digital, Toshiba announced today that it's now shipping its first 1TB standard 2.5-inch, 9mm-thick internal hard drive for laptops, the MQ01ABD series.

This is the company's first 2.5-in internal hard drive that's based on the 500GB-per-platter technology that offers the areal density of 744Gb per square inch.

Previously, most high-capacity 2.5-inch internal hard drives came in the new 12.5mm thickness standard and therefore were not compatible with most laptops and other applications.

The new drive comes in capacities from 250GB to 1TB, features SATA 2 (3Gbps), and spins at 5,400rpm. … Read more

Back at CES 2011, Toshiba's glasses-free 3D laptop wowed us, going on to win our Best of CES award for the Prototype category. We didn't expect the proof-of-concept hardware to work its way into a final product anytime soon, but apparently Toshiba had other ideas. The Qosmio F750 was previously announced in the U.K. for an August release, and now Toshiba's American arm has put a firm price and date on the U.S. version. Here, it'll be called the Qosmio F755, and will be available starting August 16, for $1,699.

Like the CES … Read more

In stark counterpoint to small, fast systems like the MacBook Air, big-screened, heavy, packed-to-the-gills desktop-alternative laptops are still alive and well, although sometimes a little hard to justify. Toshiba's Qosmio line of laptops has been a well-known example of that type of massive machine for years, and 2011's update to the Qosmio largely continues the trend with a new design. The $1,899 Toshiba Qosmio X775-3DV78 is bulky, heavy (8 pounds), and expensive, but it's also got top-of-the-line features. A quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, powerful Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 graphics, and dual hard drives with a … Read more

The Toshiba Thrive Honeycomb tablet has garnered a lot of interest due to the fact that one, it's a tablet in the year 2011, and two (and maybe more importantly), it offers a heftier, more laptop-like experience than other tablets with its full ports and removable battery.

The Thrive's identity crisis doesn't end there, however, as Toshiba offers a number of accessories, including swappable back plates that let you literally change the device's color. Using the same color tablet day in and day out can get boring, and Toshiba offers you a healthy way to spice things up.

To be sure, it's a superficial change that doesn't change the device's functionality, but it could make you more excited about using your tablet, at least for a while.

I've compiled a number of photos of Thrive's accessories (including more functional ones) here.… Read more

Intel's Sandy Bridge processors aren't just for Apple MacBooks and elite Windows laptops anymore. The latest and greatest Intel chip technology is now landing in sub-$400 lappies from Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba.

To wit, behold HP's $349 Pavilion g4-1104dx. In addition to goodies like a 14-inch LED display, 4GB of DDR3 memory, a 320GB hard disk drive, a multiformat optical drive, a Webcam, and integrated Ethernet, you get a Pentium processor B940 with integrated Intel graphics silicon.

No, that's not the Pentium processor of yore. The new Pentium is a bona fide Sandy Bridge processor, which … Read more

Along with Vizio and LG, Toshiba is the only other TV maker selling a passive 3D TV in 2011. That model, the TL515U series reviewed here, performs basically the same with 3D material as its LG doppelganger, and in short we like the image produced by active 3D TVs better. Meanwhile, the Toshiba's 2D picture quality, which is much more important in our book, didn't quite match that of the LG or the better LED-based LCDs in our tests, due mainly to its overactive backlight. Given that the two are very similar in price--the LG is even a … Read more