- The Good: First laptop with an HD-DVD drive; has a gorgeous 1080p capable TFT LCD; suitable for gamers and Windows Media Center power users.
- The Bad:Almost unforgivably weighty; the WinDVD HD player has some serious issues; should ship with more memory.
- The Verdict: An immensely powerful laptop, though its vaunted HD-DVD capabilities leave something to be desired.
REVIEW:
The $3,000 Toshiba Qosmio G30 is the Cadillac of laptops; it's a giant, expensive, luxury machine that's overkill for the vast majority of users and an understandable indulgence for a lucky few who either work in digital imaging or are extremely passionate about their Windows Media Centre and multimedia experiences.
My wife laughed when I first pulled the silver and black G30 out of my bag and said it was a laptop … she thought it was a stereo component. It's not hard to see why. The G30 is about the same height and width of a DVD player, and has a pair of circular silver and black feet on its underside.
It's also ridiculously heavy—a throwback to the dawn of portable computing. Tipping the scales at just under 5 kilograms, the G30 can technically be hauled along with you wherever you go, but you might throw your back out if it's a long trip. Compared to the slender 2.5 kg notebook that's normally in my bag, I found the G30 to be monstrously heavy. Realistically, it's a desktop PC that can be packed up and moved quickly in a pinch.
Perhaps the reason it weighs so much is that it's composed of some of the most advanced portable computer technology in the world, including a gorgeous 17-inch TFT TruBrite widescreen LCD with a 1,900 x 1,200 native resolution, Intel Core Duo processors running at 2.0GHz, a pair of 100GB hard drives, memory expansion modules built to accommodate up to 4GB of RAM (though it only ships with 1GB), and a built-in HD-DVD drive—the first of its kind in a notebook PC, and the primary reason why I requested to borrow a demo model in the first place.
The first thing I did was pop in an HD-DVD movie—Universal Studios' Apollo 13. I'd already watched the film using a stand-alone HD-DVD player, but at a resolution of just 1080i—a limitation of both the player and the television used —as opposed to the technology's maximum resolution of 1080p. Remarkably, the G30 is not only capable of outputting a 1080p HD-DVD image, it also has a screen with a resolution to match.
I was suitably impressed by the resulting picture. It was stunningly clear, bright, and detailed, and I had to get within a hand-span of the display to make out individual pixels.
But it was also so choppy that, at times, it was nearly unwatchable.
It seems unlikely that the machine's powerful NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600 graphics controller would have anything to do with the poor HD-DVD video playback, and shutting down all of the pre-installed background apps had no appreciable effect on video performance. That means the video stuttering problem likely lies in Intervideo's WinDVD HD software, which just happens to be the G30's only application capable of playing HD-DVD movies. (The current iteration of Windows Media Centre, which is what most G30 users will use to watch TV and DVDs, doesn't support the HD-DVD format. Its successor, which will be released along with Windows Vista next year, will apparently provide full support for HD-DVD.)
The poor HD-DVD performance is all the more regrettable given that many consumers will look at the G30—which comes with a handy HDMI-out port—as a way of getting around the expense of buying a standalone HD-DVD player for their televisions. I tried the G30's HD-DVD player in conjunction with an HP PL4200N 42-inch plasma set and experienced the same stuttering video effect.
At the time of this writing the only other laptop on the market with a next-generation DVD drive was Sony's Vaio Digital Studio, which goes for about $1,000 more and employs a Blu-ray drive as opposed to HD-DVD. I haven't had a chance to tinker with Sony's machine yet, so I can't comment on its Blu-ray playback capability. However, the VAIO has one important distinction: its drive not only plays Blu-ray discs, it also writes to them, whereas Toshiba's HD-DVD drive only writes to CD and DVD. I don't know if that makes it worth a thousand bucks more, but it's certainly a nice feature to have.
HD-DVD capabilities aside, the G30 is a remarkable machine.
In addition to the hardware already mentioned, the G30 has a pair of surprisingly powerful Harman/Kardon bass reflex speakers positioned just above and to the left and right of the keypad. Highs are still a wee bit tinny, but the maximum volume and overall sound quality is light years ahead of anything else I've heard emanate from a laptop.
Other key elements on the base half include a fingerprint reader and a slick silver volume control wheel on the right side, a complete set of media controls—including quick access television and media buttons—running along the top, and a terrific little touch pad on the bottom which, in addition to its mousing duties, provides controls for several applications. Touch the top right corner of the pad and six blue icons light up; one for e-mail, another for printing, a third that calls up Toshiba's configuration utility, and three user defined buttons. The touchpad also provides an alternative method for controlling volume.
Ringing the perimeter of the G30 is a vast array of ports, including four USB 2.0 sockets, S-video out and composite video in jacks, FireWire, a six-in-one memory card reader, one PC Card slot and one ExpressCard slot, Ethernet and modem jacks, microphone and dual headset ports, a VGA output, and the aforementioned HDMI output. It also supports 802.11 wireless and Bluetooth V2.0, and comes with a built-in TV tuner to round out its Windows Media Center capabilities.
Turning to performance, the G30 delivers the kind of speed and multi-tasking capabilities one would expect from a 2.0GHz dual core processor and a better than average graphics solution. I ran a variety of software simultaneously—including word processing, picture editing, and media viewing apps—and experienced no appreciable degradation in performance.
To test the G30's PC gaming competence I installed a pair of graphically demanding games: Half-Life 2: Episode One and CivCity: Rome. Though it's not a dedicated gaming machine, the G30 handled these titles with aplomb; both ran smoothly with graphical settings set to high, though more dedicated graphics and system memory would have done wonders for the massive crowds that eventually appear in CivCity: Rome.
I was also impressed with the G30's battery life. I squeezed out about 115 minutes on a single charge while engaged in a wide variety of applications. No match for many standard notebooks, but not bad, given the bright and enormous screen.
In the end, the Qosmio G30, though it can be fairly described as a marvel of a laptop, is just a little too advanced for its time. Its HD-DVD capabilities, which likely account for about 20 per cent of its price, are plagued by early adopter issues. My recommendation is to wait six or eight months, at which point we'll likely see a newer, more powerful Qosmio with Windows Vista, a less touchy HD-DVD player (probably in the form of Vista's new Windows Media Centre app), and HD-DVD write/rewrite capability.
Of course this counsel applies only to the lucky few who can justify outputting the kind cash it takes to purchase Toshiba's Cadillac of portable PCs. The rest of us will just keep on using our less endowed (though infinitely smaller and lighter) notebooks.
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