Toshiba

Today's Wall Street Journal has an interview with Atsutoshi Nishida, Toshiba's chief executive, that's kind of interesting for what it doesn't say. The article's headline is "Toshiba's Plan for Life After HD DVD" and the Q&A appears in the "Boss Talk" column, which seems to put executives in a warm seat rather than a hot seat. By that I mean there are a couple of hard-hitting questions ("Isn't the loss of the format war a blow to Toshiba's strategy?), but after you're through with … Read more

Jumping on the HD DVD bandwagon was fun for many early adopters--until Blu-ray knocked the format off the road, causing Toshiba's tech to spin out, crash, and burn. Those dazed folks still left clutching their brand-new HD DVD high-definition disc players are now scratching their heads saying, "What was I thinking?"

Slate's Josh Levin is one of those format "losers" pondering his HD DVD "D'oh" moment.

Read the story at Slate: "I'm the idiot who bought an HD DVD player"

It's kind of surprising that one of the big handset makers didn't come up with a Transformers phone at the height of the movie's hype last year. After all, just about every other form of gadget tried to cash in on it, from laptops and stereos to earphones and MP3 players.

Perhaps Softbank just and Toshiba knew that that true Optimus Prime loyalists would appreciate such a phone regardless of the movie. But it's unclear whether hard-core fans would look past the fact that the new 815T PB handset on the Japanese market doesn't really … Read more

When the format war was finally brought to a close, almost everyone was happy to see that we'll only need to watch one format try to survive in the Digital Age instead of two.

And while most of us were sad to see Toshiba throw in the towel and admit that it made a mistake with HD DVD, some were wondering how the house of cards crashed so swiftly. Some said it was due to the departure of some of HD DVD's retailers and rental services, some said it was poor internal operations and still others said it was due to the fact that movie studios simply had enough of the war.

But what if all of those assertions are false? What if all of those companies knew that an undercurrent continuously undermined the growth of HD DVD and helped Blu-ray cement itself as the winner?

What if Toshiba and Sony worked together to kill HD DVD?… Read more

As you may know, here at Crave we're big fans of the off switch. But as we've previously noted, it's an endangered species. Happily, Toshiba is keen to stop David Cameron from mounting a full-on campaign against LCD TVs by allowing its customers to turn them off properly.

You probably know what modern TVs are like. You're pretty lucky if you can find one with a proper off switch--sometimes you get a second standby button on the TV, but the good clunking motion we remember from CRTs of the '80s have long gone. This is, as … Read more

Toshiba isn't well known for its mobile phones, but it does make them. Newest among these enigmatic devices is the G450: a mobile-cum-iPod-cum-HSDPA modem. Come read why you should be interested.

The G450 is a quirky-looking device. Its keys are spread across two separate button clusters and the screen is only big enough to accommodate three lines of text--so it's pretty difficult to use at first. That's if you use it at all--it lacks many modern phone features, such as a camera, MMS, or email, but it has plenty of other tricks that make it worthwhile.

Firstly, … Read more

When Steve Jobs revealed the new MacBook Air, we were taken aback by its simplicity and elegance. But while the design is revolutionary, the Air appeals to a smaller, more specialized audience, thanks to a stripped-down set of connections and features. With just a single USB port and no expansion slots or optical drive, it's not for everyone, so we put the Air up against a selection of recent high-end ultraportable laptops for a little compare-and-contrast action.

This handy list should give you an idea of the pluses and minuses of each system (and prove that there's no … Read more

I have to hand it to fellow analyst Rob Enderle. Way back in August of 2005, he called the high-def format war in a piece titled "Blu-ray Wins or Nothing Does."

Then again, he also said in that article that "the more likely outcome is that the market will bypass both products and move to something else," so perhaps he wasn't perfectly prescient.

And come to think of it, a year later (in December 2006) he changed his mind entirely in columns titled "Optical HD Battle May Be Over: HD DVD Wins," "… Read more