Let Toshiba entertain you

Toshiba's Qosmio F10 four-in-one media centre device, which can be controlled with a remote.

As PC makers, game console developers and electronics giants battle for space in the living room, Japanese tech giant Toshiba envisages another device at the centre of home entertainment - the laptop.

Three years after the debut of the Media Centre PC, a computer designed to interact with the TV and serve up video and audio content, Toshiba has launched a range of high-end laptops to do the same.

It is betting consumers will slot a laptop into their lounge cabinet to feed digital content through their TV and stereo.

Toshiba's Australia-based product marketing manager, Matt Codrington, believes a laptop that by day can be used in the office and by night becomes a home entertainment hub is a workable arrangement.

He holds up a Toshiba-branded remote control which comes with every model of Qosmio, the new media-orientated laptops.

"Most people can relate to this," he says. "They can use it without having knowledge of the specs, speeds and feeds of the technology."

When plugged into the TV, the Qosmio effectively becomes another component along with DVD player, VCR and amplifier. But in its own right, it is one of the more powerful laptops on the market.

The proliferation of digital media led Toshiba to develop a laptop with movies, music and gaming in mind ... "things like 900 per cent growth in DVD [sales] in the last four years across Australia and New Zealand, the proliferation of broadcast and internet content, Macromedia Flash, streaming video, that sort of thing," says Codrington. "Around 700,000 digital cameras were sold over Christmas across Australia and NZ."

That equates to a lot of digital content floating around on computers.

Toshiba has developed a simple user interface for the Qosmio to play music and DVDs, watch and record TV feeds and view a web browser or digital still pictures.

It's a system not nearly as slick as Microsoft's Media Centre Edition, a version of Windows XP tailormade for consuming media. Toshiba's version is merely a front-end that activates existing media players loaded on to the computer. It is, however, easy to use and integrates well with the laptop's remote control.

Its target market: the single professional in a small apartment. Detached from the TV and stereo, the Qosmio is a powerful entertainment device in itself.

Both models - the F10 and G20 - have twin lamps for greater brightness, important in DVD viewing. Built-in speakers pipe out rich sound. The machines are Wi-Fi enabled, letting them link wirelessly to other computers and a broadband hub.

The Qosmio is also geared to playing high-definition files through Windows Media Player 10, though the TV tuner is analogue. Codrington says high-definition video files deliver image quality four times better than DVDs, and are starting to proliferate as more movies are released in high-definition format.

The laptops feature Linux-based partitions on the hard drives which run the built-in TV tuner card and DVD drive, avoiding booting up the computer before using either function. Accessing media becomes more like turning on the TV.

"If you take [other] notebooks home and plug it in, you have limited options," says Codrington, pointing out that Qosmio owners are unlikely to remove their laptop from the lounge every day.

The G20 weighs 4.5kg, not the type of device you want to lug to and from work.

Recording live TV to the Qosmio's hard drive is a matter of pressing a button on the remote. But lack of an electronic programming guide continues to limit such devices.

Sky Television plans to debut a low-cost personal video recorder (PVR) this year featuring a hard drive for recording Sky programming and link to Sky's electronic programming guide through on-screen menus. Australian pay TV operator Foxtel already has such devices in the market.

With the major broadcasters tightly controlling the copyrighted programming information that is at the heart of any electronic programming guide, the chances of Toshiba and other vendors being able to bundle this information with their devices are slim.

"It's groundbreaking stuff and a lot more work has to be done," says Toshiba's New Zealand manager, Callum Eade, who points out that broadcasters are wary of the time-slip features of PVRs, which effectively allow viewers to skip ads.

In the meantime, the current generation of Media Centre PCs from the likes of Hewlett-Packard, and home-entertainment hybrids such as Toshiba's laptops, offer more basic recording functionality.

Also holding back the growth of Media PC-type systems are the low sales of plasma and LCD TVs. The tube-based TVs used by much of the viewing population are not ideal for displaying digital content.

Toshiba doesn't have the reputation here of a major home entertainment player that it enjoys in Europe, the US and Japan, but it certainly competes against the likes of Philips, Sony and LG in TV.

Noel Leeming is selling a 42-inch plasma TV for $7000 and the company has LCD and rear-projection TVs and home-cinema projectors in the market here.

Codrington says Toshiba has not ruled out releasing a Media PC designed solely for the living room but, for the meantime, the company sees the laptop doubling as an entertainment hub.

"Our strength is in our mobility," he says.

Toshiba expects the Qosmio to sit in the lounge most of the time, being removed occasionally when the family wants to go on holiday or computing power is wanted in another part of the house. The only problem there is that removing the laptop from beneath the TV removes the home theatre system for everyone else.

Toshiba's home-entertainment strategy has some kinks but the Qosmio models certainly show how versatile the laptop has become.

Codrington says future models will come with a docking station which would sit permanently connected to the TV, avoiding the need to keep reconnecting audio and video inputs every time the Qosmio returns to the lounge.

In Australia where the Qosmio models have been selling for six months, they have accounted for 8 per cent of Toshiba's laptop sales. But with the F10 selling for $5000 and the G20 $6000, they're a niche product.

The main points

* Toshiba has entered the fray as home entertainment hub provider with the Qosmio four-in-one laptop.
* The $5000 to $6000 device has a built-in TV tuner allowing programmes to be recorded to a hard drive.
* It can be controlled with a remote.
* The 4.5kg machine is also touted as a notebook for work applications.
* For the same price, you can buy three Media Centre PCs.