Toshiba has announced that it will ship HD DVD drives in all of its laptops starting in 2008, according to the senior vice president and head of the "never give-up" division. The company has been losing the format fight against Blu-Ray recently, with several companies dropping HD DVD completely and committing fully to Blu-Ray.
Still, the new move is a good one by Toshiba — one of the bigger laptop retailers, it could even get them back in the Blu-Ray race, which is great news for all of us really wish they’d pick a damn format already.
According to data from IDC, Toshiba sold 9.2 million notebooks last year and is in the top five overall shipments — so, that’s 9.2 million future notebooks with an HD DVD drive, something that definitely brings the format back into the game and gives Blu-Ray a run for its money… again.
Toshiba also plans to use flash memory in their laptops, as soon as this month — mostly due to prices on NAND chips falling far enough to make it feasible.
You’ve got to hand it to Toshiba — they’re doing what they can to keep their format alive. Personally, we think someone needs to either create a hybrid of the two formats or the feud needs to end soon — we don’t care how we get our HD, someone give up already. Right now, our money is still on Blu-Ray, but we’re both tired and slightly surprised to see Toshiba still in the game.
DevLib.Org
