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Toshiba pushes DVDs into notebook PCs
By Rob Guth
InfoWorld Electric
Posted at 6:52 AM PT, Aug 6, 1997
Toshiba is in the final stages of developing a slim DVD-ROM drive that the company is planning to ship worldwide built into notebook PCs in the coming months, a company official said Wednesday.
The official did not provide any details about the drive but said the PC will be at the high end of the company's product line, now occupied by the Tecra series.
The machine will be based on Intel's Pentium MMX CPU and will have an MPEG-2 decoder necessary for decompressing data from the DVD drive. Other specifications have not been finalized but the PC may ship with a 13.3-inch TFT LCD, he said.
"This product will be focused on the early adopters or high-end users," he said.
The plan advances Toshiba's long-term mission to put DVD drives into the hands of users and to build a market for developers of software for the high-capacity platform. The devices are considered the successors to today's CD-ROM drives, with which they are backward-compatible.
DVDs with 4.7GB capacities have recently begun cracking the desktop market, with Toshiba being one of the first companies to deliver a DVD-equipped desktop PC. Gateway 2000, meanwhile, plans to ship a DVD drive with its forthcoming 266-MHz Pentium II-based desktop, the company said.
Toshiba Corp, with headquarters in Tokyo, can be reached at toshiba.co.jp.
Rob Guth is a Toyko-based correspondent for the IDG News Service, an InfoWorld affiliate.
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