If you've spent any time watching DVDs or television on a laptop, you know it's an experience plagued by lengthy startups, fuzzy pictures, and incomprehensible interfaces. With all that in mind, Toshiba set out to design a new generation of notebook TVs, with a phalanx of special electronics to clean up the screen, a quick startup, and one of the easiest user interfaces.

The new line is spelled Qosmio and pronounced "cosmio," which is a combination of "cosmos" and mio, the Italian word for "me." Carl Pinto, Toshiba's director of product development said, "We think of it as a way into everybody's personal universe." The plan is for a whole line of computer/entertainment devices to be released over the next several years.

Name games aside, the first PC TV to be equal parts computer and entertainment center began in 2003 with a simpler notion. "When the idea for Qosmio began to gel a year ago, the worlds of LCD TVs and digital recorders and computers were miles apart, with little overlap," recalled Pinto, who oversaw the development of the Qosmio family. "We wanted to bring them together in one device and make it all portable."

TV First, PC Second
The engineers at Toshiba's facility in Ome, Japan, started with a clean sheet of paper. Rather than building the device off of an existing line of notebooks and suffering through the inevitable compromises, Qosmio was designed from scratch to do four things well: display TV, play a DVD, digitally record, and perform as a full-power notebook. "We call it the AV notebook PC with no sacrifices," said Pinto. "We believe that the notebook TV has truly come of age. The key was less any individual item than the way it all works together."

Following focus groups that defined the outlines of what Qosmio needed to do, they got down to work. Qosmio needed to be an imaging powerhouse. In addition to its Nvidia's GeForce FX Go5200 graphics accelerator, Toshiba included what it is calling the Qosmio engine, which enhances the image quality and creates sharper edges, smoother backgrounds, and-above all else-delivers more natural color. "The Qosmio engine makes it more of a TV experience than a computer experience," said Pinto.

Toshiba didn't stop there. Its TV tuner is integrated into the notebook, not the port replicator, so that it can tap into the system's PCI bus rather than the slower universal serial bus. This way it can grab the show you want, process it, and send the audio and video signal quickly on its way. The breakthrough was making the tuner more intelligent by adding time-based image correction and by de-interlacing the signal, "both of which beef up the signal prior to display," explained Pinto. "When you're watching TV or a DVD, it's not fuzzy. It looks as good as any TV you could buy."

Toshiba's TruBrite display looks excellent. According to the development team, it had to be as good as a desktop LCD monitor, which meant using two light tubes instead of the single tube that's standard on notebooks. In the end, it pumps out 600 candelas per square meter of brightness, or about three times the output of the typical notebook. Sound is just as important, so the Qosmio features specially designed Harman/Kardon speakers that can handle 2 watts of power each and sound more like a stereo's speakers than the typical notebook squawk box.

A big goal was to bridge the worlds of old and new media by providing the best assortment of multimedia ports this side of a desktop computer. It's got the basics, but Qosmio goes a step further by adding video-in plugs so that the system can connect to a variety of analog sources, like a VCR or analog camcorder. "I spent last weekend copying my family's old video tapes to DVDs by using the composite video connector," said Pinto. "I couldn't have done this before Qosmio."

The proof of a notebook TV is in the watching, and rather than booting up the PC and waiting (and waiting), Qosmio uses a quick-to-load Linux media player for television and DVDs. Just click the remote control and the television is on in less than 10 seconds. "TV viewers don't want to wait a minute for the machine to start, enter a password, just to watch Jeopardy," explained Pinto. "They just want to watch, and this one-touch button does it."

Read about the making of iPod mini.
And pick up this month's issue to read about the 24 Mobile Innovation Award winners.