The Qosmio is the absolute pinnacle in multimedia notebooks. It brings everything you need for a good Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) system and squeezes it into a notebook form-factor. Albeit a large notebook form-factor. Yes the Qosmio is a huge and heavy notebook, but it's not nearly as heavy as it would have been if it was packed with desktop internals as many desknotes of this size usually are. Instead, the Qosmio has notebook components which lessens the weight and extends the battery life.

All of this is hardly a compromise though, as the Qosmio F10 has a great deal of grunt inside. Built around a 2GHz Intel Pentium-M 755 processor coupled with 1GHz of DDR RAM the Qosmio is capable of handling the minutiae of business and educational life, but the notebook comes into its own when dealing with media and media playback.

The processor and RAM help out here too, but it's the extras in the display, storage and audio areas that elevate this notebook. Firstly, the Qosmio's display is absolutely superb. Featuring CSV (clear super-view) reflective coating on the panel, the screen looks like a TV when it is running. While there's some slight warping to this finish, it's still the best example of this kind of display we've seen. When looking at the desktop the CSV coating doesn't add a great deal, but once you fire up a DVD, start watching television or browse photos the effect is instantaneous.

The colours deepen, action is much more vibrant and the images sharpen. The flatness and dullness of TFT disappears. It looks amazing, but the only problem was some tearing during panning shots in DVD and video playback.

The graphics subsystem is also a strength of the Qosmio, as it comes with a 128MB NVIDIA GeForceFX Go5700 GPU which allows for a bit of gaming. In 3Dmark01 it achieved 12608 3Dmarks -- a respectable amount for a portable notebook.

There's an additional side to the Qosmio's display too. As previously mentioned the Qosmio comes with both S-Video and Composite inputs for recording video from devices other than the TV signals, but what these connections also allow you to do is connect up cameras, DVD players, VCRs, other PCs, Xbox and PlayStation consoles and other devices, and use the Qosmio's display as a standalone TFT. These inputs can bypass the Qosmio's internal graphics system and plug direct into the display. With its audio inputs you can also forget about lugging external speakers around too -- the Qosmio has them built-in. These Harmon/Kardon speakers supply some surprisingly rich sound and are capable of pumping out quite a volume. They're still notebook speakers though, so some tinnyness remains, but the range from plugging in headphones is excellent.

As a Media Center notebook the system has to be capable of recording TV, and the 80GB hard drive offers plenty of storage room for archiving recorded programs. Similarly, when (and if) you do run out of room on the hard drive there's a multi-format DVD burner included. Not only is this capable of burning +/-RW discs but it also supports burning for the new dual layer DVD+R9 discs as well.

TV playback is great with the screen, and the Qosmio really harnesses the power of Windows XP Media Center Edition. If you're in the market for a really good media notebook and particularly want one to show around and off, then the Qosmio F10 from Toshiba is the best example we've seen that fits the bill. Price wise it attracts that Toshiba brand-name premium, but when it comes down to it the Qosmio is an amazing notebook and the price is quite palatable for the specs and performance.