I Attempted To Rise But Was Unable To Stir

News from Brett - Monday, 29 December 2008 @ 10:53pm

With a reassuring total of zero press release emails received in the Brett Email Box today, it's time once again to go to the backup plan and roll out "Hardware Monday" here at AG for another week. Plus, as a special Christmas bonus, I'll be throwing in some jokes in addition to my normal "more irony than Nutri Grainy" comments.

Knock Knock

Who Is There?

Aunt!

Aunt Who?

Aunt You Glad I'm Not Looking At Another God Damn Netbook?

That's right kids, this is no 10 inch Netbook, in fact this is the biggest laptop box I've ever seen and it's holding the Toshiba Qosmio G50 18.4 inch Personal Notebook Computer. It's made in China like everything these days, and the box not only contains an equally massive power adaptor, but also four Chinese people to help you carry the computer home and set it up. I wonder what my Chinese friends ate while they were in the box during shipping, perhaps Toshiba packed six Chinese people in there, or maybe they had crackers and cheese, I dunno, but it makes you wonder hey?

All righty! Time for some more advanced photography tutorials. I've taken this picture of the Qosmio logo using a technique I created called the "Zero Gravity Power Bang." To capture a shot like this you need to stand on a chair above the subject, press the shutter release and then drop the camera. Normally the memory card will survive the fall, even if the camera doesn't, so it's perfectly safe.

Here's the G50 with the lid closed. I went to a Toshiba Product Launch recently and they told me that the shape of the G50 was inspired by a shark. Personally, I would like to see the theme extended to a shark tooth keyboard and shark skin chassis finish.

Wacko! It's the G50 with the lid open, which means it's fact time, especially for my forum friends who keep asking questions like "Was that even a review?". Did you know that Toshiba had a significant stake in the research, development and production of the Cell Processor for the Sony PS3, and that they have actually placed a Cell Processor in this Notebook and included custom applications for CPU intensive tasks like video rendering to utilise the Cell?

Of course it's not all seriousness at Toshiba Labs, because they've also had a stab at gesture control with the G50. Essentially, you fire up the software and stand around with your thumb up like The Fonz trying to get the cursor to move in the right direction. I had originally planned to play Quake 3 using gesture control, but to be perfectly honest I couldn't even get the thing to understand left mouse clicks.

My buddy Fred had slightly more success with it, until some idiot stuck his head in front of the camera and ruined everything. Still, according to Toshiba at least, this thing renders video at some incredible speeds, so it could be the laptop for you if you're some sort of travelling video taking/rendering person.