Toshiba Confirms Plans for Blu-Ray Player, Laptops
Toshiba has confirmed plans to launch Blu-ray players and computers.
A few weeks back there were rumors that Toshiba was going to bite the bullet and launch a Blu-ray player. The company confirmed reports this past weekend, stating that it intended to introduce products that support the Blu-ray format.
In a press statement, Toshiba announced that it had applied for membership to the Blu-ray Disc Association and went on to say that the company plans to introduce players and notebook PCs with integrated Blu-ray players in the course of 2009, elaborating that the details of the products, including the timing of regional launches, are now under consideration.
Toshiba is known for making good quality consumer electronics, so format-war aside, the company's decision to launch Blu-ray products shouldn't come as a surprise. Why not produce something that will earn you money? Will you be buying a Toshiba Blu-ray player? Let us know in the comments below!

I'm not about to change my DVD writer for a reading device that can not save data to a recordable.
Billions spent on increasing the capacity of a disk 5 times. For home movies users I can see a point, for computer users pointless. For portable storage we have flash drives bigger, faster and can be reused.
We need to try and seperate the idea of high capacity media from high definition content, what BluRay does is enforce HDCP. If content protection in the factor then moving away from rotational optical disks should have been the goal all along.
If I had the money Toshiba spent on HD-DVD I would have looked at SDHC cards. Large enough to hold tons of Hi-Def content, compatible with all SDHC readers in computers, laptops, portable devices. Adding an SDHC reader to an upscaling DVD player is easier and cheaper than having disk reader that reads Blue and Red lasers. Physical media is the size of a postage stamp and the surface wont scratch, even an oversized protective plastic case with the movie poster on it could be the size of an old audio cassette.
The only thing to do to keep the studios happy would be to find a way to make them read only, (not hard), and to disable copying, (bit harder). If they crack the non-copy bit then the capacity of the media can scale up much higher than optical. Sony have already said a new type of Memory stick could do up to 2TB.
C'mon Toshiba, get your thumb out your ass and get on it!!!
This is a pretty good point...
As long as you can still burn CD/DVD with it then this is good news.
I'm waiting for the first service to offer downloadable HD content whether it be on Xbox Live or Netflix or whatever. To me, that makes way more sense than.
I imagine a future where you can go to a high speed download kiosk (or use your computer) and download movies that you purchase to digital media like flash drives. Screw this bluray crap. It's worthless.
i think this would be the biggest obstacle to overcome for a media format such as that.