Daily IFA coverage from Berlin

The future face of home media?

"Imagine you wake up on a Sunday and while staying in bed you can read the paper, check your emails and view photos from the party the night before... Later you might be looking in your pantry to see what's missing, and check the shared family calendar to synchronise appointments... And you can do it in one second at your fingertips."
This was the opening gambit of Marco Perino, general manager PC Options, Peripherals and Service Division, Toshiba Europe GmbH as the Journ.E touch was launched for the first time at IFA.
With this device, Toshiba are hoping to be first to market with what it believes will become ”the fastest growing product category in the overall consumer electronics space„. The home multimedia tablet lets you do all the social and practical things you normally would online, but is highly portable and allows you to access info instantly without having to boot up.
What’s that you say? I can use my iPhone/Blackberry for that? The 7-inch TFT touch sensitive display with LED backlight and touch screen menu is a lot more accessible than fiddling with a key board and small screen.

Lightweight - only 450grams

Apparently Toshiba are not intending to replace a household’s notebooks or netbooks but say: ”this is the easiest way to connect to the internet and experience multimedia content in a second. It’s about ease of use and speed in connecting to the internet„ (using the built in Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, with supporting WEP, WPA and WPA2).
Unfortunately when asked about the time line for distribution to New Zealand and Australia, Toshiba were vague, saying only that it: ”will be available from the fourth quarter 2009 via selected resellers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa„. The price? A cool 249 Euros.
Currently the Journ.E is running Win CE 6.0 pro with Internet Explorer and Windows Multimedia Player 9.0. Supported file formats include JPEG, MP3, WMA, MPEG 4, H.264, divX and WMV.
Other trends to watch from IFA include the now mature Blu-ray Disc market; networking; mobile entertainment, communication and navigation; and flash memories with huge capacity replacing mechanical storage.

By Pauline Herbst