You know how much we love Toshiba, a company we had a lot of respect until they decided to snub us for the simple reason we’re foreigners living in Japan… As an example, at Toshiba’s booth at Ceatec 2007 we started recording a video of a HD-DVD product and asked to stop because the product was labeled “For the Japanese Market Only”… Yep, apparently foreigners are not allowed to see Japanese Toshiba products sold in Japan, and our assistant explained that like Toshiba, Akihabara News is a KK with a HQ in Japan and that makes us Japanese as well… (true story). To my knowledge and after talking about it with several IT professionals and journalists, Toshiba has the worst reputation in Japan when it comes to communication and relationships with the press.

Anyway, the losers over at Toshiba Japan, which arguably launched the HD-DVD, an interesting DVD upgrade, rather than a completely new technology, were until recently against implementing Blu-ray technology in their products and preferred selling us their crappy up-scaling technology. But according to YOL (Yomiuri Online), a respectable Japanese News online publication belonging to a respectable Japanese newspaper… Toshiba will offer a Blu-ray capable device sometime this year. Yep, not much info here, but we shall see.

PS. If you work for Toshiba (wherever you are located) and get annoyed with our usual bashing contact us. We will be happy to explain how badly we’ve been treated by your company and maybe we could sort something out.