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Toshiba Dynabook TX/98MBL is first to play Blu-ray 3D content
Ah industry firsts, a chance to grab the spotlight before the world grabs hold of your coattails. Toshiba's Dynabook TX/98MBL claims to be the industry's first laptop to play back 3D content in Blu-ray format when it ships at the end of July in Japan. The 15.6-inch laptop with LED backlit 120Hz panel (60Hz to each eye when viewed through active shutter glasses) pushing 1,366 x 768 pixels utilizes WinDVD BD to playback the Blu-ray 3D format with some help from NVIDIA's 3D Vision software and GeForce GTS 350M hardware with 1GB of dedicate video RAM. Inside you'll find a Core i7-740QM processor, 640GB of hard disk, up to 4GB of memory, a Blu-ray disc drive of course, and harman/kardon stereo speakers with Dolby Advanced Audio to help make the most out of 3D gaming. Price is not listed but it's expected to list for about ¥250,000 (about $2,700). What, you do want 3D on your 15-inch laptops don't you? Update: Toshiba wants you to know that it'll be called the Toshiba Satellite A665 in Europe, presumably because "TX/98MBL" can only be pronounced by the Japanese.
NVIDIA outs 300M mobile graphics series, causes little excitement
Many a mind might've strayed from all the CES crazy-talk about future tech and wondered as to what exactly is going on in the war against bad graphics on otherwise totally sweet laptops. The answer from NVIDIA is, disappointingly, not much. The green giant of GPUs quietly snuck out its 300M mobile GPUs over the turn of the year, and there was good reason for the lack of fuss -- the top tier GeForce GTS 360M sports the same number of processing cores as its 260M predecessor, accompanied by the same 2GHz memory clock and identical 128-bit memory interface. But don't despair yet, sailor! There's the stark omission of any GeForce GTX models among the new 300Ms, which should fuel hopes that this gap in what NVIDIA calls the enthusiast market will be filled by Fermi-shaped chips come March of this year.
