The format war has ended quite a while ago with a shameful defeat for Toshiba's HD-DVD. Philips & Lite-On Digital Solutions (PLDS) decided to celebrate the event with the announcement of the joint venture's first USB external BD-ROM drive that will arrive on the market later this year.

The new BD-ROM optical unit is especially targeted at the home-theater laptop PC users. External Blu-Ray drives are becoming more and more popular, now that the standard is the undisputed winner on the market, and you may remember that Buffalo and Aleratec released their own models of Blu-Ray external recording drives.

"Due to recent market developments we can expect an increasing volume of movies to be released in high definition on Blu-ray Discs," said Jelmer Veldman, European Marketing Manager at PLDS. "The market adoption of Blu-ray as the optical disc standard for High Definition content results in a growing demand for Blu-ray playback solutions. The portable external Lite-On BD-ROM drive allows users to playback their Blu-ray discs on any PC via a USB 2.0 cable."

The upcoming model of Blu-Ray external player, called the Lite-On DX-4O1S, can read Blu-Ray Disc media at 4X, single-layer DVD at 12X, dual-layer DVD at 8X, and the old CD media at maximum speeds of 32X, if supported by the optical support. Lite-On also offers internal Blu-Ray drives for as much as $150.

The drive installs extremely easy: you just plug it into a spare USB port and the system is instantly turned into a Blu-ray playback machine, ready to be used even by the most novice users with no hardware knowledge at all. All they need is to identify the USB 2.0 port on their notebook PC.

The Blu-Ray format is becoming more and more popular as the demand for high-definition content increases. The DX-4O1S is a "versatile read-only device for all popular optical media formats" and is expected to kick in with an extremely competitive price.