Hands-on: Toshiba Qosmio F750 Glasses-free 3D laptop Preview
The new multimedia-focused Qosmio F750 is the world's first glasses-free 3D laptop. We get an early hands-on look to see if it really is better to watch 3D films without a pair of specs
Other than its 3D screen, the Qosmio F750 is well suited to multimedia content. The Blu-ray re-writer supports BD-XL media, so you’ll be able to burn up to 100GB of data to a single disc as well as play your films. We couldn’t fully appreciate the Harmon Kardon speakers at Toshiba’s preview event, but we could at least hear Blu-ray movies reasonably well over the room full of tech journalists. Connectivity is reasonable, with three USB ports, including one that supports the faster USB3 standard, a multi-format memory card reader, HDMI, VGA, headphone in and microphone out ports.
Unsurprisingly, there are some powerful components inside the F750. A quad-core Intel Core i7-2630QM processor clocked at 2GHz should handle almost every task, especially when sped up to 2.9GHz using Turbo Boost, and a generous 6GB of RAM will certainly help when multitasking. Despite the quite sizable battery sticking out the bottom of the laptop, we aren’t sure how long it will last considering the high-performance hardware inside. We won’t be able to estimate battery life until we get the F750 into our labs, but we don’t expect it to rival ultra-portables and netbooks.
Gamers will certainly appreciate the Nvidia GeForce 540m graphics card, which has 1.5GB of dedicated video memory. Nvidia 3D vision-enabled games will be playable in 3D on the laptop, but we weren’t able to test gaming performance during the demonstration. Although we would expect most games to be playable in 2D; in 3D newer titles could struggle to hit a respectable 30fps at the screen’s native 1,920×1,080 resolution.
Very little has changed physically from the previous Qosmio, with a red and black chassis that looks very similar and the same flat QWERTY keyboard. The keys felt very close together, despite being full-size, but we could still type accurately. The touchpad is a good size, so we could navigate the expansive desktop quickly.
Overall, the Qosmio F750 looks like an interesting prospect; it’s difficult to say whether glasses-free 3D will take off, but its well-suited to laptops with a single user. The expected retail price of £1,300 will certainly limit its appeal, but fans of 3D video are sure to be interested when it goes on sale later this year.
We’ll be taking a more in-depth look at the F750 a little closer to its release date in August.