Toshiba Adds DVD Burning to Notebooks

Toshiba's new addition to its series of Satellite 5200 notebooks features a DVD-recordable/rewritable combination drive, a feature expected to appeal to consumers interested in digital media, the company announced Tuesday.

The Satellite 5205-S703, which starts shipping Tuesday, is the first Toshiba notebook to come with a built-in combination DVD-R/RW drive in the U.S. Toshiba announced a notebook with a combination DVD drive earlier this month at the World PC Expo show in Tokyo, and other Japanese PC makers are starting to release notebooks with the technology.

Combination DVD-R/RW drives allow users to burn CDs in either a write-once format or a rewritable format. Write-once DVD recording is a more efficient method of data storage, but rewritable DVDs allow users to add or remove small portions of data from a disc, according to analysts.

The notebook combines Intel's 2-GHz Mobile Pentium 4-M processor and Nvidia's GeForce4 460 Go graphics processor, which comes with 64MB of video memory, for increased digital-media performance, says Masa Okunura, director of product marketing and worldwide product planning for Toshiba.

"[Digital media enthusiasts] are looking for this type of video performance," he says. The notebook also comes with an infrared remote control to allow users to view movies on the 15-inch UXGA display from a distance.

Toshiba includes a wireless Internet card based on the 802.11b standard from Agere Systems integrated into the notebook, and three USB 2.0 ports for peripheral downloads.

The Satellite 5205-S703 comes in a fixed configuration with the Intel and Nvidia processors, 512MB of RAM, a 60GB hard drive, and the DVD-R/RW drive for $2,699.