Toshiba HD DVD player under $100 Friday |
If you’ve considered getting your hands on an HD DVD player before the holidays you may want to consider hanging out at your local Wal-Mart tomorrow morning. According to their totally legit Secret In-Store Specials page, many stores will be offering the Toshiba HD-A2 HD DVD player starting Friday at 8am through the weekend for a mere $98.87. The player was previously priced at just under $200 and is still listed at around $200 at Amazon and almost $300 at most other places.
The Toshiba HD-A2 is a 2nd generation player that supports the HD DVD disc format, rivaled by none other than the high-definition Blu-ray disc format in an ongoing high-def war, which currently seem like it will have no end. The player outputs in 720p/1080i formats and has SD up-conversion to 480p/720p/1080i. And as you might expect, as soon as you buy this one its expected to be followed up soon by its upgrade, the Toshiba HD-A3, which Sears is planning on selling for $169 with two HD DVD movies bundled with it.
Toshiba apparently has some designs on offering the largest capacity, small form factor external hard drives on the market. It has just announced the new Toshiba 250GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive, priced at around $190.
Having square LCD monitors in the back of your vehicle’s headrests may soon be a thing of the past because Toshiba has figured out how to make a circular LCD screen. The electronics giant will unveil its no corner LCD screens next week in Yokohama at the FPD International 2007 convention. The screens use Toshiba’s proprietary low temperature poly silicon technology and allow for panel instrumentation to be circular too. Imagine having a built-in rear and side door views available on your car’s dashboard or an odometer whose background color you can change.
Available Oct 19th, the new addition to the Gigabeat line is based on the Windows Mobile operating system and comes in three color styles: navy, gold and black. Toshiba is treading water with the functionality included in this 11.5×75×14.2mm / 168g package though.
Toshiba is expanding its line of gigabeat MP3 players, the company announced today. It is introducing the new gigabeat T400, a flash-based player priced at around $120.
Toshiba unveiled today what it’s calling a compact projector with “extreme short projection” and wireless functionality. The Toshiba TDP-EX20U is priced at around $1,600.
Sighted at the IFA trade show currently taking place in Berlin is this funky red ergonomic keyboard. Sure, we’ve all seen/used keyboards in the past that have promised to save wear and tear on our fingers but this nifty little circular keyboard was designed in mind for the serious gamer. 
Hot on the heels of yesterday’s Apple news concerning the 80GB and 160GB iPods, Toshiba has just released its own news about two similar sized storage media units of its own. Sometime before the end of the year the ’shiba will release the MK model 80GB and 160GB 1.8-inch hard drives which, coincidentally, also happen to be the same memory size as the just-announced iPod Classic models. Except that there is no coincidence when it comes to technology, is there?
Toshiba announced today what it is calling an “affordable” widescreen 3LCD mobile projector. The Toshiba TLP-WX2200U is priced at around $1,000 and is available for your home theatre or board room needs now.
Look around and you will see digital photo frames everywhere. Just as digital cameras seem to have replaced the older style film ones, are we seeing the end of traditional paper photos in frames? Could be if the price for these marvels keep dropping.
Toshiba announced last week the release of a wireless docking station that utilizes ultra wide band (UWB) technology, marking one of the first consumer-based uses employing the wireless connectivity. The UWB connection between the docking station and the notebook allows peripherals including an external monitor to have faster connection speeds than traditionally available through Bluetooh or WiFi.
The Toshiba U103 Gigabeat has launched in Japan coming in an almost unheard-of 24 different color options. There really isn’t much else different from the previous U102 version of the Gigabeat other than the additional colors. Offering changeable face plates to give some individuality might not have been a bad idea either but often seems to make the player seem a little cheaper, so we have to say it’s nice to see a player come in this broad of an array of colors. It would be nice if more DAP’s would catch on to this.
A spokesman from Toshiba announced today that the company is recalling a batch of Sony-made batteries for some of its notebooks. Fortunately the count in this recall is only about 5,100 which is significantly less than the 8 million that Sony recalled last September.
The HD-DVD/Blu-ray war continues on with no signs of either side giving ground. The latest offensive assault comes from the HD side with an announcement from Toshiba proclaiming they are releasing a firmware update that will let its HD-DVD players access the Web to download exclusive content. All that Toshiba owners need do is connect their player to the internet via the device’s Ethernet ports and the unit will take care of it automatically. 
As hard drives continue to shrink in size and increase in storage space, Toshiba gets to wear the crown for how much you can store on a portable HDD. The company has had its debut in this marketplace by launching 2.5-inch 100GB and 200 GB portable HDDs that are USB 2.0 compatible. That’s about 90 DVD movies you could hold on the largest Toshiba drive, good enough so that you can take it with you on trips for the rest of your life, and its hard shell casing makes it great to stick inside your travel bag too. 
