New Toshiba notebooks sport ATI Radeon discrete graphics cards and more.
It would be the understatement of the century to say that Toshiba "has been making notebook computers for a while now" -- in fact, its lineage stretches all the way back to those luggable XT PCs with glowing orange gas plasma displays.
The company announced some distinctly nice new notebooks for Europe today including the
A500 and the U500 notebooks. Both of the machines fit in the Toshiba Satellite family.
The A500 sports a 16-inch 16:9 aspect ratio screen with a resolution of 1366 x 768 and a built-in TV tuner that can pick up both analog and digital broadcasts. Other features for the notebook include a Harman Kardon sound system and HDMI out with REGZA LINK technology. It runs an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, a rather staggering 8GB of Ram, ATI Radeon discrete graphics with 1GB DDR3 VRAM and a 500GB HDD or optional 64GB SSD. These sort of high specs (especially with TV tuning and quality speakers) are quite unusual in a 16" notebook -- they're usually found in the hefty home theatre notebooks in the 17" and above size range.
If that is too much machine for you, Toshiba also announced a smaller ultraportable machine called the U500 that offers a more compact 13.3-inch screen with 1280 x 800 resolution and weighs in at under 4.5 pounds. Certainly, no feather weight, but light enough for most users. The machine will use an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, 8GB of RAM, up to a 500GB HDD, and ATI HD 4570 graphics. Toshiba promises the battery life is over 3.5 hours, which isn't bad with a discrete graphics card.
The machines will launch in Europe in July for about €699 ($AUD1223, but as usual, brace yourself to be reamed as an Australian purchaser with lower system specs and higher prices).