The Toshiba NB550D netbook isn’t expected to ship in the US, but Nicole at Netbook News managed to pick one up in Taiwan. The little laptop is one of the first computers to ship with an AMD C-50 dual core processor and Radeon HD 6250 graphics, but that’s not its only claim to fame. It also has Harman Kardon speakers built into the palm rest (with a tiny subwoofer on the bottom of the computer).
Nicole has posted an unboxing video and while she hasn’t benchmarked the performance of the CPU and graphics yet, she does demonstrate a nifty feature: You can use the speakers even when the computer is turned off. Just plug in an audio source such as an MP3 player or other portable device, and you can use the netbook like a kind of bulky, expensive set of portable speakers. Still, the best mobile devices are the ones you already have with you, and if you plan to carry the netbook around with you anyway, it’s nice to know that you don’t also need to pack speakers in your bag (if you’re the sort of person who’s likely to do that).
You can check out the unboxing video after the break.
Finally some innovation to the netbook segment. I hope all future netbooks (Eee PC) use this speaker concept. Smartphones and netbooks together would be a deadly combo if you can have some music playing and not sucking your netbook battery. All netbooks need is a video in concept (hdmi) so you can hook up your smartphone for video playback.
Who knows, there is already some pressure to produce more convergence among the available mobile devices with either convertible or transformable hybrids so far.
I for one would welcome a netbook with a KVM like dock for a smart phone to combine the strengths of both. It’ll at least be a better solution than the Lenovo Skylight and a step up from the Motorola Atrix 4G.
Though such a product may be less likely once they make Windows available on ARM but it depends on the status of netbooks by then and whether they make any improvements on battery technology as that’s one of the main things holding progress back as presently the only way to increase run time is to reduce power usage and that’s hard to do and still make a competive performance device.
Yeah. I do see smartphone/netbook connectivity as being the future. It should be at least. With the Atrix 4G dock system, I would ask myself, why have this shell of a netbook when I should be able to have a actual netbook which allows connectivity, ie video input etc.