See correction below.
Toshiba Corp. announced seven new notebooks Tuesday that run the gamut from large widescreen consumer notebooks to lightweight wireless models for business travelers, the company said in a release.
The overall PC market appears to be regaining some of its late-1990s muscle, driven primarily by consumers falling in love with bulky notebooks that offer desktop multimedia performance in a "luggable" package. Both IDC and Gartner Inc. credited the strong growth of consumer notebooks for the healthy third-quarter PC shipment numbers, but corporations are also looking to notebooks as they replace desktops purchased during the Y2K upgrade cycle.
Widescreen notebooks are becoming increasingly popular with consumers and are featured on five of Toshiba's new notebooks. The P25-S509 comes with a 17-inch widescreen display, a form factor that has done well without a lot of promotion from notebook vendors, said Matt Sargent, an analyst with ARS Inc. in La Jolla, California.
The 17-inch displays should be popular heading into the fourth-quarter holiday buying season, Sargent said. Apple Computer Inc. was the first vendor to release a 17-inch notebook, he said, although Toshiba's version is less expensive.
Hewlett-Packard Co. just released a 17-inch widescreen notebook, but Sony Corp. and Dell Inc. have been conspicuous with their lack of a 17-inch model, Sargent said. Notebook buyers should expect to see 17-inch models from those vendors before long, he said.
Despite the interest in widescreen notebooks, prices are still high enough to dissuade some customers, said Stephen Baker, director of industry analysis for NPD Techworld in Reston, Virginia. As prices come down, sales of those notebooks should increase even more dramatically, he said.
The Satellite P25-S509 and Satellite P15-S409 are designed for performance, with desktop Pentium 4 processors from Intel Corp. and graphics cards from Nvidia Corp. The P25 has a 17-inch widescreen display, and the P15 comes with a 15.4-inch widescreen display.
For $2,199, the P25 comes with a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 processor with hyperthreading, 512MB of DDR (double data rate) SDRAM (synchronous dynamic RAM), an 80GB hard drive, a DVD-RW/CD-RW optical drive, and an integrated 802.11g wireless chip. The P15 features the same processor, memory configuration, wireless chip, and optical drive, but comes with a 60GB hard drive and a different GeForce graphics card, for $1,899.
Another widescreen model, the P10-S429, comes with a 2.66GHz Pentium 4 desktop processor, 512MB of DDR SDRAM, a 60GB hard drive, a 15.4-inch widescreen display, a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive, and a 802.11g wireless chip for $1,599.
Toshiba also addressed the low-end of the market with the A35-S159 at $1,399 and the A10-S169 at $1,199. Most notebooks sold fall into this price range, but the segment is not very profitable for vendors, Sargent said.
Toshiba's A35-S159 comes with a 2.3GHz Mobile Intel Pentium 4 processor, 512MB of DDR SDRAM, a 60GB hard drive, a 15-inch display, a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive, and integrated 802.11g wireless connectivity. The Satellite A10-S169 comes with a 2.2GHz Mobile Intel Pentium 4 Processor-M, 256MB of DDR SDRAM, a 40GB hard drive, a 15-inch display, and a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive.
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