World’s first HD DVD-R laptop hits the market!

Last weekend, Japan became the first country in the world where the only laptop computer featuring an HD DVD-R drive, Toshiba’s Qosmio G30, can be bought at this time.

Since the disc format used by this computer is the read-only version of the HD DVD format, which is backed by Toshiba, it shouldn’t be a surprise the fact that Toshiba is also the company that made the first laptop capable to use it.

A worthy competitor to the Blu-ray format backed by Sony, the HD DVD-R is capable of holding up to 15GB of data on a single-sided disc, compared to the 25GB of a single-sided Blu-ray disc.Leaving the HD DVD-R format aside, the new Qosmio G30/97A is an upgrade to the current Qosmio laptop computers already available for sale in several markets. Based on an Intel Core 2 Duo processor (no surprise here, obviously) running at 2GHz, the G30 has a 17 inch display capable of displaying HD movies at a resolution of 1920X1280 pixels.

The 4.8kg laptop has a storage space of 320GB and 1GB of memory, while the graphics tasks are handled by the NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600 GPU, helped by 256MB of video memory.

At last, if you want connectivity, with Qosmio G30 you can get anything you can think of - USB 2.0, Firewire, PCMCIA, ExpressCard/54, multi-card reader, 802.11a/b/g, gigabit Ethernet, modem, VGA, S-video, S/PDIF and HDMI. Quite impressive, but the price is also pretty high, since you’ll have to pay 3,320$ for this power toy…

Technorati Tags: Qosmio G30, Toshiba, HD DVD-R , HD DVD