Blu-ray | PC Pro blog

First looks: Toshiba Satellite P500

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

The Toshiba Satellite P500 is a big laptop. Not a-little-larger-than-a-typical-laptop big, more size-of-the-universe big. Take a look at the photo if you don’t believe me: this is a kind and perfectly normal-sized lady at the Toshiba booth at IFA Berlin, yet it dwarfs her.

“It’s not funny,” she said, having held the laptop for 30 seconds as I fiddled with the camera, “this laptop is heavy.”

That’s also undeniably true, but then the Satellite P500 wasn’t built to be carried between home and office. This is a machine designed to entertain, and Toshiba packs in all the hi-tech goodies you can think of to make it a pleasure to use. (more…)

Tags: blu-ray, desktop-replacement, laptop, toshiba

Posted in: Hardware

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Who’d have thunk it: good films sell Blu-rays

Monday, December 22nd, 2008

To most, the recent format war was boring, unnecessary and hyped out of all proportion to the number of people who actually cared. DVDs were fine, no one even had HD tellies, and the thought of shelling out what were then £400+ prices for what could soon become obsolete understandably put off, well, everybody except the movie studios.

When the PlayStation 3 arrived with a Blu-ray drive there was only going to be one winner, and HD-DVD duly succumbed as the studios deserted it. With HDTV sales booming, what should have been the turning point for Blu-ray adoption ended up making practically no difference to the take-up rate, and while the studios are so quick to make excuses that’s entirely their own fault.

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Tags: blu-ray, sony, the dark knight

Posted in: Random, Rant

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Amazon takes shopping next-gen

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

If anyone’s going to change the way we shop online it’s Amazon. It sells pretty much everything you could ever wish to buy on a high street, usually at lower prices, with fast, often free delivery and (in my experience) excellent customer service.

But the one problem online retailers have is capturing the browsing shopper. With only a home page to compete with the highly visible displays in most shop windows, it’s not easy to simply wander around an online store and spot something you may not have been looking for.