Oh hey, welcome to 500GB laptop drive announcement party Toshiba. Shame you had to come dressed in the same 9.5-mm slab, 2.5-inch 3Gbps SATA interface, 1.4 watt idle power draw, 5,400rpm spin, and 25dB hum as everyone else in the room. Pretty, but still embarrassing. No full-disk, hardware encryption but at least you can take comfort at besting some (but not all) of your competition by actually shipping your drive in December.

[Via Impress]

After a flurry of leaks and announcements caught our attention last year, we've heard nary a peep from Toshiba about its multi-faceted device since. Suffice to say that's it's out in parts of Europe and countries with a penchant for the backward "R" and "N." Great, but what is it and how well does it do what it does; that's the convoluted question. Fortunately, IntoMobile went hands on with the USB memory stick / alarm clock with snooze / MP3 player / 7.2Mbps HSDPA USB modem / tri-band GSM cellphone and came away with the opinion that "the device is excellent." It pulled a respectable 2.7Mbps off O2's UK network and performed reasonably well as a "backup phone." The 160MB of storage for MP3 / AAC music playback was disappointing but it served its purpose in a pinch. Still, that's a lot of device for £140.

[Via IntoMobile]

Yeah, we confess we're nerds and watched all that behind-the-scenes stuff on the Matrix DVD -- when it's the only DVD you own, you gotta get your money's worth. If you'll recall (don't try and deny it), the much-lauded "bullet time" effect was accomplished by surrounding the leather-bedecked Keanu with dozens of digital still cameras to capture every millisecond of his limbo moves from every angle. Commercials aplenty soon co-opted the technology to push their wares, but Toshiba is flipping that formula here, hiring an ad agency with its very own bullet time variant called "timesculpture" to plug Toshiba's XDE technology. A circular rig with 200 Gigashot HD camcorders and 20,000 gigabytes of data later, they created this little number, which mixes full motion video, Matrix camera moves and a healthy dash of hipsterism. Check it out after the break.

Given that you've surely got rafts of free cash to burn through right now, we know you're eager beyond belief to drop north of four large on a new gaming notebook. To that end, we're utterly thrilled to announce that Toshiba's Qosmio X305-Q708 (starts at $4,199, goes to just under infinity) is available for purchase direct from the company. If that just seems downright insane to you, the three-GPU X305-Q706 is also available now for "just" $1,999.99. The big ticket inclusion here? An NVIDIA GeForce 9400M paired with two GeForce 9800 GTS GPUs. Or, enough to make Crysis weep.

Ruh roh. We're really, really hoping this isn't just the first of another long string of laptop battery recalls, but the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, in cooperation with a slew of other outfits, has just announced a voluntary recall of around 35,000 Sony laptop batteries. As you'd expect, the Li-ions in question "can overheat, posing a fire and burn hazard to consumers," and there have already been 19 reports of overheating including 17 reports of flames / fire and two reports of consumers getting mildly burnt. For the full list (and it's pretty long) of affected laptop models from HP / HP Compaq, Toshiba and Dell, be sure to give the read link some serious attention. Oh, and stop using that battery pronto if yours is one of the afflicted.

The dense just keep getting denser -- er, something like that. Anywho, those who just love talking about fabrication technologies over tea and crumpets will adore what Toshiba's boasting: a new family of 43-nanometer SLC NAND flash products. The 16-member crew will range in density from 512Mbits to 64Gbits, with a trio of 'em (16Gb, 32Gb and 64Gb) integrating 43nm monolithic 16Gb chips, "the highest density SLC NAND chips available." Tosh is hoping to find its new gear in all sorts of mobile phones, office automation equipment and servers when they begin shipping in Q1 2009, but it's keeping pretty quiet on the pricing front for now.

[Via Physorg]

If this here press releases didn't have a date of February 1997 on it, we'd swear this was some sort new fancy new development. Sure, robots have been playing sports for ages, but seeing this here creature revived begs the question: why don't we all have one or two of these laying around the house by now? The prototype seen in the video linked below can recognize spoken commands, react to incoming spheres, identify actions of nearby humans and spike volleyballs in your grille all day long. In all honesty, Tosh probably converted this into some sort of elderly assistant bot that didn't catch nearly as much press, but we're still holding onto a sliver of hope that this thing is just about ready for commercial release.

Read - Volleyball robot video
Read - Original volleyball robot press release

Oh sure, you've seen a brief glimpse of Toshiba's NB100 (a pre-production unit, at least) at the company's own Mobility Conference, but things just feel a little different when the spotting goes down in the wild. The LXF Team was lucky enough to get their camera on Tosh's UK-bound rig, and while nothing was tremendously shocking, it was called out for boasting a "boxy, but sturdy construction that looks like a shrunk-down 'serious' laptop." Check out a finalized unit beside an equally cute Aspire One in the read link below.

[Thanks, Mike]

Look out, Alienware / Voodoo -- a formidable opponent just rolled in, and it appears that some prankster stuck a Toshiba logo on whatever machine is hiding underneath. All jesting aside, Tosh is revamping its -- shall we say, vivid -- Qosmio X305 by introducing the Qosmio X305-Q708, which houses a potent Core 2 Extreme QX9300 CPU, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, a 128GB SSD, 320GB 7,200 RPM SATA drive, dual-layer DVD writer, twin NVIDIA 512MB GeForce 9800M GTS graphics cards, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR and Windows Vista Ultimate. You'll also find a full-sized keyboard with a ten-key number pad, four Harman Kardon speakers, HDMI / DisplayPort connectors, 1.3-megapixel webcam, Wireless USB / USB Sleep-and-Charge technologies and a 17-inch TruBrite LCD (though resolution remains a mystery). It should be available any moment for around $4,199.99, but we'd factor in a few extra hundies to have Colorware blot out the putrid "fiery Fusion" finish (seen better after the break).

Toshiba and SanDisk have been in a number of joint ventures for some time now, but it looks like the two companies are now starting what could be a more drawn out break-up process, with SanDisk announcing today that it's selling 30% of its manufacturing capacity outright to Toshiba in a $1 billion deal. For the time being at least, the two will remain 50/50 partners in the remaining 70% of the companies' joint factories, though Toshiba will apparently get 65% of the production capacity at those factories. As MarketWatch points out, this latest move comes just a month after SanDisk rejected a $6 billion buyout offer from Samsung, and some analysts are now speculating that Toshiba's deal will only make the company a more attractive target for Samsung. Nothing is expected to get wrapped up before August of 2009, however, which is when Samsung's current royalty arrangement with SanDisk is due to expire.

[Via The Inquirer]

Toshiba's R600 ultraportable got lost in the din of Tuesday's MacBook announcements, but TrustedReviews got their hands on the 12.1-inch ultraportable, which replaces the crazy-thin-and-light R500 and goes up against some pretty tough competition like the VAIO TT. Not a lot of external differences here -- it looks identical to the R500 -- but the keyboard, screen, and overall fit and finish have apparently been much improved, and the bump to Centrino 2 and the corresponding 1.2 or 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo processors is certainly appreciated. Click on for a bunch of pictures of the new rig, including some teardown photos.

Late last month, we found that Toshiba's Satellite NB100 netbook was making a beeline to the UK, and while a press shot is well, fine and good, there's just nothing like a little hands-on action to get you salivating. The crew over at TrustedReviews made it over to Zurich for Tosh's first ever Mobility Conference, and the star of the show wasn't one of those new Portégé machines or the Tecra R10; rather, it was the 2.29-pound NB100. Of note, the unit shown was a pre-production rig that shouldn't change much before it's loosed on the public, and contrary to earlier reports, it will boast three USB sockets to bring it in line with most of its closest competitors. Unfortunately, early impressions were that the keyboard was lacking, and the glare-filled display wasn't exactly smiled upon. Check the read link for additional shots and a few more blurbs.

[Thanks, Patrice]