NBR Toshiba Interview - Give Us your Questions

Hey y'all,

We are going to do an interview with Toshiba Product Manager. I would like to collect a bunch of good questions from the Toshiba fans and notebook community here on NBR.

Similar articles will be written up for a few other companies I have contacts at, so universal questions are OK and will probably be reused in the future. I'll post in the relevant forums as things firm up.

Post your questions over the next few days and I'll select some (and give credit of course).

Cheers!

Perry

 

Why do you create such crappy notebooks?
Why are you called Toshiba?
Why are your product lines called what they are?

 

Ha! They will love number one.

 

Why won't you give Jooooeee all the free laptops he wants?

 

Let's get some mature questions here guys.

How about:

What are your thoughts on this new push for budget $300 / $400 laptops such as the Asus Eee PC and Everex Cloudbook, will Toshiba start competing here?

How is the Satellite X205 doing for Toshiba and will they keep pushing into the gaming sector?

Will Toshiba ever reenter the PDA / Smartphone market?

What about the UMPC form factor, Toshiba was one of the first ever companies to produce laptops and then Tablet PCs, why didn't they push the envelope here too?

How do you compete against a rapidly growing HP, resurgent Dell, hungry Acer and Lenovo? Is the competition getting daunting in the laptop world?

 

Why won't you make your x205 series customizeable online? When I get my x205-Sli4 delivered in a few days i might get a T9300 off eBay when the price comes down after a few months to replace the T8100. Would have bought a T9300 with it if they had it. Also I will probably get 4GB of DDR2 800 soon so that it doesn't need any memory dividers to run it with the 800FSB processor.

 

Toshiba was formed by the merger of two companies. Shibaura Seisakusho (Shibaura Engineering Works) and Tokyo Denki (Tokyo Electric).

Shibaura Seisakusho was formed in 1875 as Tanaka Engineering works and was the first manufacturer of telegraph equipment in Japan. They changed their name in 1904. They were a major player in modernizing Japan during the meiji era and were a world industrial power.

Tokyo Denki was established as Hakunetsusha in 1890 as Japans first incandescent electric lamp manufacturer, but changed their name to Tokyo Denki in 1899 when they branched out into other condumer products.

In 1939, the two companies merged to form Tokyo Shibaura Denki, but they only renamed themselves Toshiba Corporation in 1984. Currently the worlds third producer of semiconductors, behind Intel and Samsung.

Courtesy of wikipedia.

As for crappy notebooks, you have to understand Japanese laptop habits are different from yours. They definitely don't demand the same sort of games, need less resources in general, and favor extremely portable laptops. Vista has almost no foothold here(it's near impossible to find software for your phone that supports Vista.) Possibly the reason for the "crappy laptops" is due to their extremely advanced and widespread system of arcades and manga/internet cafes, as well as a massive level of support for both Nintendo and Sony.

Arcades here are better than anywhere else. There are extensive networks dedicated to most of the games, which allow inter-arcade competition, sometimes via direct connection(most of the RF card games, the gundam battle pods, etc) They're everywhere(mainly taito or sega). They have a fairly quick turnover on games(yes, they have new games every couple weeks) The arcades in places like Akihabara draw LARGE crowds of people, so it's not hard to find superior challengers for things like fighting games.

Manga/internet cafes typically charge about 2-300 yen an hour. Food is often available, as well as unlimited drink bars and alcohol. Private cubicles, dvd players, tons of manga, comfy chairs,showers, and often a very good internet connection. Many are open 24 hours a day, and will offer 2000 yen "overnight". Cheaper to stay in there than in other forms of temporary lodging, leading to the rise of "netto kafe nanmin", or net cafe refugees. They're also convenient if you missed the last train(trains run from 5am to midnight usually, and are the main form of transportation in most areas around Tokyo) With a place where you can sit in comfort with most of your needs taken care of, what need for a powerful laptop?

Most of the games I see produced in Japan for the PC are either the RPG/dating sim type, or 2D(fighting, shooting, platforming). They come from smaller developers, place more emphasis on art than American/European studios, and are either meant to have infinite replayability or a simple 20 hour play'n'toss life.

On the other hand, the PS2 still has many games coming out for it here. As well, the PS3 and the Wii get everything before it gets exported. Many games are never exported. A Japanese game store is craziness shoved into a tiny storefront(and the large ones are even crazier). What need for a powerful laptop when you game on the console most of the time. Here, consoles outnumber PCs by a HUGE margin.

Hope this baka gaijin's ramblings weren't too hard to read.

 

As a proud owner of the X-205 Sli1 I wonder why there is not more support for video driver updates, as this model was obviously intended to be used for gaming... I also wonder about customization.... even an option for an XP version would be nice ....

 

Yeah, I'll be probing around the gaming rig and Qosmio lineup. Especially now that HD-DVD is dead.

Thanks Andrew those are pretty good questions. I would think that the house of Libretto and Portege would be coming with something to fight EEE.

I'll, monitor here for a couple more days and then lock the thread.

 

Thank You. That was a interesting and informative read Grimmwold.

My question: Why don't you make it easyer to upgrade to a faster CPU after purchasing a particular model by providing information about which CPU's it's motherboard will support?

 

When or can we have CTO laptops on the Canada website?
and one comment I have is that I hate bilingual keyboards, I think they should die. If you have CTO, this wouldn't be a problem.

 

I'd like to know whether Toshiba plans to introduce what Sony calls "hybrid graphics" (or Alienware calls binaryGFX) into any of their notebooks -- where you can switch between a discrete video card and onboard graphics depending on whether you want maximum graphics performance or longer battery life.

 

I'd like to know what's Toshiba's strategy in the "Gaming" market? Why havent they prepared some sort of concierge service for their "Gaming" division like Dell has (XPS brand, excellent CS /w XPS, etc.). How do they plan on improving their customer support for these types of notebooks? Being treated like a complete noob and going up multiple levels in the CS chain only to be told by a "Level 3" technician that they cannot help you is not acceptable.

Just look how they alienated their previous "Gaming" notebooks, the P105/P100 series. For months (11 to be exact) there was a serious issue where every 3d app, game, video would stutter every 5 seconds due to a buggy BIOS. It wasnt until December that they resolved this issue. I spent hours on the phone / weeks without my "Gaming" notebook trying to have technicians diagnose my problem untill finally it turned out to be the BIOS. I never even got an apology from any rep concerning this issue or anything. It's this kind of stuff that gives Toshiba a bad image.

 

What makes Toshiba so toshibic ?

 

I'm with the guys that ask about a customized/upgradeable Gaming series... Why not make the X205 series customizable or upgrade friendly, even if it entails purchasing the parts through Toshiba? I'm running 4GB of ram, upgraded both hard drives, even disassembled the entire laptop and swapped in a new Penryn CPU.... granted, I'm crazier than most, but having to tear apart an entire laptop to get at the CPU on a machine that is meant to be enjoyed by enthusiats is a bit extreme.... and then the whole issue of graphics.... why not even a possible plan for giving us an upgrade path to newer GPU's?

I don't think Toshiba makes crappy laptops at all; I'm actually totally happy with the build quality and so far have had no problems, but it doesn't quite feel like an enthusiats product... we like to tinker and tweak as much as play, seems like the X205 would be a great platform as an affordable solution to that market, so why not support it? Also, good point on the drivers for it, why not more and quicker support in that area?

Last, I just bought an EeePC to go along with my X205-SLi1, so I would also be very interested in their thoughts on this market.... To pay $300-400 for a fully functional, totally competant machine that runs XP beautifully and is so small? How can you not want one ha? Where's Toshiba's version? Is one even planned? We've had cheap laptops from them (I also own a $500 base model that i purchased for a family member), and their smaller line that is upwards of a $1000 or more, but nothing in the small and cheap catagory...

Anyway, just some thoughts, basicly what others have said....

 

my question - how are you going to fix a problem with black screen that happends almost in every second laptop from toshiba!!! new drivers, updates .....

 

I to would be interested in seeing where Toshiba is going as far as branding with its gaming machines. They've designed some very nice equipment but when you go to their website, its basically just another model number. They don't really differentiate them from their business models. This, to me, would be better driver updating, gamer focused accesories and upgrades, and promotions.

I'm also curious if toshiba has any other plans for the base of HD DVD drives they have built up.

 

1. Why they said that the X205 would play gears of war straight out of box which is crap you cant play the game with out updating the video drivers from laptop video 2 go i think it is fraud.
2. When are they coming out with 8800 in sli.
3. Why does their tech support suck bad, ( they told me because i use firefox they cant help me with connection problems).
4. Why they have proprietary gpus why not give a normal form factor that makes it easier to upgrade possible.
5. No upgrade options for notebooks.
6. how about overclocking options in the bios and dont tell me because of heat msi does it with a 15.4 notebook.
7. how better resolution with the screen
8. What is toshiba going to do since they stop supporting HD when almost all their notebooks come with HD players.
9. how about better cooling solutions for their notebook they put fans away from the sources of heat such as cpus and gpus. they would be more useful active to passive instead the other away around.
10. x205 speaker are awesome they blow any others away, are they going to keep this trend up.
11. new gpu bios would nice.
12. how about physics cards any in the future.

I think i covered some good points.