The good: Plays DVD without booting into OS; remote control; bright display; high-quality speakers.

The bad: Expensive; no Gigabit ethernet; one-year warranty; average performance; no ExpressCard slot; no Bluetooth.

The bottom line: If you want a notebook to replace your television, DVD recorder and play games, this machine will do it all at less than a grand off the price of its better-equipped sibling, the Toshiba G20.

Read full review of the Toshiba Qosmio F20 »

By Darius Chang, CNET Asia
Nov 22, 2005

Despite convergence hitting the notebook category like a brick, there are few desktop replacements which can claim to take on the role of a complete home entertainment setup. Toshiba's first product for this market, the Qosmio G20, set an excellent precedent to follow, but unfortunately came at a price that few were willing to pay. In response, the Qosmio F20 with a smaller display and slightly reduced features has inherited enough traits from its predecessor to double as a home entertainment replacement at a significantly lower price.

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.

	If it looks big, that's because it is big.

With its array of connectivity ports, it is a nice touch that Toshiba manages to keep most of them them located at the front and flanks for easy access. The ethernet and input ports are placed at the rear to hide unsightly cables and prevent tangles. The laptop puts its size to good use by incorporating a full-size keyboard, touchpad, a row of dedicated A/V buttons and a rarely seen volume dial. Unlike the slot-in optical drive of its predecessor, a more conventional tray-loading DVD writer is used instead.

Completing the home A/V features is a full-sized remote control and built-in Harman Kardon speakers. Though we would have appreciated if the Windows XP Media Center edition was installed, the F20 uses the proprietary QosmioPlayer to replicate the multimedia features.

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.

The back side is as clean as a whistle.

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.

	A remote control completes the package.

Unless one is tone deaf, great visuals mean nothing if the audio quality is on par with a walkie talkie with poor reception. Luckily, the Qosmio F20 kept the great sounding Harman Kardon speakers which maintain audio fidelity even at levels sufficient to drown out heavy traffic. For the picky audiophile, an optical output provides lossless transfer to your favorite hi-fi setup.

The QosmioPlayer software greatly simplifies the home A/V aspect of the machine. Capable of playing DVDs and music CDs without having to boot into Windows XP, it even allows TV viewing and recording. However, it must be noted that time-shift capturing and access to multimedia files require Microsoft's OS. A row of dedicated buttons control brightness levels, playback and recording progress. A nice touch is the addition of a volume dial which is more intuitive than the volume buttons found in other laptops. For the couch potato, the included remote control unit has enough buttons to control almost every multimedia feature available. Unless typing is required, there are enough buttons to ensure that you may never have to leave your sofa when using the Qosmio F20.

Performance And Battery Life
Despite the high-end specifications, the Qosmio F20's performance is underpar compared with the Dell Inspiron 6000 and the thin and light Fujitsu LifeBook S7020. Not only do they have the same Pentium M 750 1.86GHz processor and 1GB memory, the other two comparison units use integrated graphics chipsets which impose a resource penalty on the system.

BAPCo MobileMark2002 performance rating (longer bars indicate faster performance)

Toshiba Qosmio F20 (Pentium M processor 750 1.86GHz; 1GB RAM; 533MHz FSB) 182 Fujitsu LifeBook S7020 (Pentium M processor 750 1.86GHz; 1GB RAM; 533MHz FSB) 232 Dell Inspiron 6000 (Pentium M processor 750 1.86GHz; 1GB RAM; 533MHz FSB) 195

Though battery life is not a priority for desktop replacements, the Qosmio F20 has a respectable 2 hours 54 minutes of runtime. This is significantly improved from its predecessor, though it is still unable to compete with the LifeBook S7020 is 3 hours 16 minutes and Dell's 5 hours of uptime.

BAPCo MobileMark2002 battery life in minutes (longer bars indicate longer battery life)

Toshiba Qosmio F20 (Pentium M processor 750 1.86GHz; 15.4-inch screen) 174 Fujitsu LifeBook S7020 (Pentium M processor 750 1.86GHz; 14-inch screen) 196 Dell Inspiron 6000 (Pentium M processor 750 1.86GHz; 15.4-inch screen) 300

Service And Support
Toshiba offers a one-year international carry-in warranty for this machine. However, we feel that for a high-end notebook a minimum of three years is more reasonable. Should a problem occur, the unit will have to be brought down to a Toshiba service center for repair as there is no telephone technical support. A list of service centers can be obtained from Toshiba's Web site, which also hosts updated drivers and utilities.

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