14 DAY TRIAL // One of our posts of yesterday discussed about three companies that were expected to release their own versions of netbooks. Apparently, of the three - Sony, Toshiba and NEC - Toshiba has decided to take matters a bit further by officially announcing a new product, which should reach users very soon.
The latest development in the future releases comes from the editors at the APCMag website, after they succeeded in getting the scoop from none other than Mark Whittard, General Manager of Toshiba Australia, during the company's annual MobileXchange mobile computing forum in Sydney. According to him, Toshiba has been taking a more vivid interest in the netbook market for quite some time now and, as a result of it, the company should have a ULPC of its own in almost no time. Unfortunately, Whittard was not very generous with the details so, for the time being, we can't say when exactly the "ultra-light personal computer" will surface. However, all sources indicate it should appear sometime before the end of the year.
As noted above, details about Toshiba's upcoming product are scarce, but some of Whittard's statements seem to indicate this will probably feature a display of approximately 9 inches. Moreover, Toshiba is apparently going to take a different route than all the other netbook manufacturers, as it plans to offer a premium product, for which it can charge the user a few hundred dollars more.
"We can build any product, but the reality is you have to have a return on your engineering investment, and the problem with the ULPC is while it woke up the market and attracted buyers because it was $499, all it did was shift the vendors' cheapest products down a few hundred dollars." Whittard declared.
By looking at the company's current product lineup and overall experience in the portable computer market, we can easily draw the conclusion that its upcoming product will be different from its competitors. As proof of what Toshiba can achieve at the higher-end of the technology and price scale, Whittard demonstrated a paper-sized touchscreen device developed by the company's R&D team. This sported a 5.6-inch screen and packed a 64GB SSD, GPS receiver, while running a Windows Vista in tablet mode.