Its all about Toshiba

Toshiba Tecra A4
Widescreen is still one of the flavors of the month for notebooks and plenty of users are opting to banish boring old 4:3 aspect ratio LCD panels to the land of wind and ghosts.

Toshiba has come out with a brilliant widescreen notebook with some nifty features. While ASUS's W5 on page ^^ is small and speedy, Toshiba takes a slower, more relaxed look at computing. The two are fairly similar on the feature front, with only 200MHz separating the two on the CPU side.

The performance results are predictable, with ASUS having the edge; Toshiba Tecra A4 returned 2835 points in PCMark04, an indication of its competence as a good productivity and media notebook. The gap opened a little in synthetic graphics testing, with the Toshiba managing only 3761 3DMarks -- not exceptional, but enough for a reasonable frame rate in last generation games.

The bundled multi-format DVD burner is ideal for home or business file archiving or creating home movies in conjunction with the 4-pin side mounted FireWire port. A front-mounted wireless switch means you can turn the device on and off as required, leaving it off when not in use will help conserve your battery and improve your mobile run time.

Any manufacturer can put together a notebook and sell it, but the bundled goods are usually the standout features. Toshiba includes a recovery disc for users for when things go pear shaped, allowing you to quickly recover your system to factory settings. Also included is Toshiba Assist, an application for helping users with common problems like network configuration, security setting changes, system diagnostics for easy troubleshooting and an optimize menu with access to functions such as formatting removable memory.

Well priced for the amount of notebook being offered, Toshiba continues to break barriers and is offering a solid all-rounder notebook at a very reasonable asking price.

Toshiba to launch Windows and Android tablets
Toshiba has decided that bringing out tablets is the way to continue its sharp increase in sales, and is considering dual screen and Android models.

The company witnessed a 50 per cent surge in US sales in the first quarter of 2010, with the world's fifth biggest PC maker pushing 1.5 million units out of its doors between January and March in the US alone. According to Jeff Barney, the firm's general manager for digital products, the figures were due to a "leveling" of selling prices, which had been decreasing for some time. Lower component costs also helped the firm post the exceptionally favorable figures.

Barney also announced that Toshiba is considering a "variety of form factors" for its slate PCs and even mentioned a dual-screen model that would run Windows 7. Another unit will supposedly have a screen size of "roughly 10-inches", which is pretty much the same as Apple's I pod.

Unlike Apple's overpriced toy, Barney said that prices will be similar to notebooks, but he also said that the models that run Google's Android operating system will be less expensive than those models that have to pay Microsoft's license fee for Windows 7.

Toshiba's enthusiasm for tablet devices apparently is unbounded with Barney stating that the firm sees that there is a market for such devices. Similarly industry thumb twiddles In-stat said that "up to" 50 million of the devices will be shipped in 2014. To help its cause Toshiba also said it is lining up content partners.