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There are times when an ultra slim notebook just doesn’t cut it. Times when you wish it had more power and could do more.
The Qosmio F20 is an answer to just such a need, provided you are willing to turn a blind eye to its "slightly" bulky size and weight.



Toshiba Qosmio F20 Design

No one will mistake this notebook for a thin and light. Coming in at size large, this 373 x 274 x 43.2mm desktop replacement reinforces the sense of immobility with a granite slate-textured cover and a 3.6kg heft. The unit is made of high-quality white plastic which feels sturdy yet doesn't convey the sense of class which the black Qosmio G20 eludes.
However, this model doesn't suffer from the high-maintenance required by the fingerprint-prone exterior of the latter.

Toshiba Qosmio F20 Features
One of the most fullyfeatured laptops available, the Qosmio F20 is the Inspector Gadget of mobile computing. The built-in TV tuner and DVD writer combination renders a DVD recorder impotent, while a high-end dedicated graphics card runs almost as smoothly as a gaming console.
Additional touches come in the form of a bright display as well as high-end speakers which complete the sight and sound experience.

Starting with the computing aspect of the Qosmio, the unit comes with three USB 2.0 and one FireWire port. The 5-in-1 reader is able to handle most flash cards in the market, with the recent mini-sized offerings requiring an adapter.
Network connectivity is handled by the ethernet port, modem and wireless card that can link with 802.11b and 802.11g routers. However, we were disappointed that the faster Gigabit ethernet was not implemented,nor the Bluetooth functionality for hooking up to mobile phones.
The PC card slot is compatible with the current PCMCIA devices, but will be unable to use the next-generation ExpressCards for expandability. The F20 uses adapters which allow different composite configurations to use the single input connector.

The built-in TV tuner does a respectable job of capturing local TV channels with acceptable quality. But the killer application is the time-shift recording function which allows the simultaneous capture and playback of television programs. Unable to watch the Amazing Race because you get home late? The F20 can be scheduled to wake from standby mode and capture your show. And should you reach home half an hour into the program, this notebook can play back the previous 30 minutes while continuing to record till the Philiminator eliminates a team. Combined with a DVD SuperMulti double-layer writer, you can archive your favorite scenes into an optical media.

The display is a 15.4-inch widescreen transflective LCD capably of 1,280 x 800 pixels of resolution, down from G20's 17-inch 1,440 x 900-pixel resolution. In contrast with most 200 nits LCD notebooks, the F20 is more than twice as bright with a rating of 420nits. Even under the strongest sunlight, videos and pictures can be seen clearly without irritating reflections, the bane of transflective screens everywhere. Graphics is driven by Nvidia's GeForce Go 6600 chip with 128MB of dedicated video memory which should be adequate for handling resource hogs a.k.a. first-person shooter games. Though gaming while recording television is not advisable unless you like your videos to resemble a series of disjointed images, we had no issues when multitasking video capture and light computing tasks.

[Via : CNET Asia]
Read another Toshiba Qosmio F20 review at CoolTechZone.