Toshiba: Storage, Laptops, And PBXs
Toshiba came as a triple play, with representatives from three different divisions that are based in southern California: laptops, telecom and storage.
Toshiba has long been a name associated with laptops, and this month the company celebrated the 20th anniversary of its first portable. The T1100 featured a 4.77 MHz Intel 80C88 processor and 512 kB of RAM in a nine pound package. Today Toshiba is continuing to innovate, and the company produces both desktop replacement models as well as ultra-slim versions.
The Tecra M4 is a high-performance tablet machine that comes with support for 3D graphics and high-speed DDR2 SDRAM and hard drives. One of its nicer features is that the machine automatically detects which end is up and quickly readjusts its display accordingly. They also showed us the Portege S100, an ultra-slim notebook weighing in at just above 4 pounds, and the Portege R200, the thinnest and lightest Toshiba notebook to incorporate a 12.1" screen. The R200 is also less than an inch thick and weights 2.6 pounds.
Both Portege models include the ability to temporarily park its hard drive heads when it detects any quick movement, to protect your data. The S100 also includes a spill-proof keyboard.
The Toshiba Telecom group was also in force, talking about a new line of telephony switches that are available for small and large office installations. "We want to have the ability to migrate our customers from analog to Voice over IP situations," said Jon Nelson, product manager. "We spent the time to design in a separate IP processor, and it allows us to use the older phones.
Toshiba's new phone switches offer something called "feature flex," which gives the user the ability to use a scripting tool-like environment to customize a set of new features, without the need to wait for Toshiba's own developers to do the coding. "Things like custom routing are supported," said Nelson. "You can have the ability to call right back someone who has left you a voicemail message, even while you are listening to it. This was all programmed with feature flex and something we should have done years ago," he said.
The smallest and most impressive items from Toshiba, though, were from the storage group. Small hard-drives are in high demand; the popularity of MP3 players and laptop computers drives the market, but cell phones will soon jump into the mix. Toshiba's 2.5" drives are well known to laptop users, and their 1.8" drives are popular in the MP3 player market.
Toshiba anticipates having an 80 GB 1.8" drive out soon, which may usher in a new era of smaller laptops, as the higher capacity may entice some manufacturers to move from the current 2.5" drive size. In addition, MP3 players will be able to carry even more songs - time to fire up iTunes!
Cell phones and portable GPS systems also need storage space, and the new thumb-sized 0.85" drives will soon be available in four and eight GB sizes.
