Toshiba Qosmio G30-163 review

Toshiba's Qosmio G30-163 contains the first HD-DVD drive we've seen.

Unfortunately, the much-hyped format war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray hasn't really begun, making it too soon to evaluate the drive's potential. We were unable even to acquire an HD-DVD for testing before this issue went to press.

It's a good thing HD-DVD is just one small part of an impressive range of capabilities. There's Windows Media Center Edition 2005, so you can browse your media files easily. Toshiba has also included a stylish black MCE remote control for this purpose. There's a hybrid analogue and digital TV tuner so you can watch and record TV programmes.

The display is capable of doing justice to HD video content. It has a huge native resolution of 1,920x1,200, which is enough to deal with HD video or complex applications. It produces a bright, clean white, but some graininess detracts from fine detail. Colours are excellent, though, and our colour spectrum test was displayed smoothly.

The speakers are also good, and sound clear and well balanced. They aren't very loud but you could add an external pair for use at home. Toshiba has included Dolby Home Theatre, with support for virtual surround and Dolby Pro Logic II.

When you finally stop playing with all the media toys, the Qosmio is more than capable of doing some work as well. This model has a fast 2GHz Intel Core Duo T2500 processor with 1GB of RAM. It did extremely well in our application benchmarks. It will also play modern 3D games, with its Nvidia GeForce Go 7600 chipset scoring well in our Doom 3 test.

Size is the main issue. The Qosmio isn't that much smaller than some PCs and weighs a whopping 4.3kg. You won't be carting this around with you, despite its decent battery life. Even though it's bulky, the keyboard doesn't have a number pad, and some keys are a bit small. Keys lack travel and the keyboard flexes when pressed. The touch pad is accurate but could have been larger. You may want to use a mouse instead.

Inside the chassis is a pair of massive 120GB hard disks, which can be organised into a RAID array for increased speed or backups. The HD-DVD drive can read and write to all standard types of optical media.

This is a monster of a notebook with a scarily high price to match. If you don't need this much computing power, there are cheaper models around with reduced specifications. It's an impressive computer, and it's stylish despite its bulk. But at this price you'd expect everything to be perfect, including the keyboard.