After losing the format war against Sony, Toshiba is yet to produce Blu-ray hardware, but at least they keep on rolling out DVD hardware in their VARDIA series. The company yesterday announced two new HDD/DVD recorders for the Japanese market [JP].

Remember HD DVD? The video format developed by Toshiba that lost the format war against Blu-ray? Today Toshiba held a pretty interesting annual shareholder meeting in Tokyo during which president Atsutoshi Nishida didn’t say they will revive HD DVD but that his company thinks about producing Blu-ray products.

I haven’t had the chance yet to try it out but those who did say the Toshiba TG01 seems to be a pretty good cell phone. Needless to say, the TG01 (1 Ghz CPU, 9.9mm body and a 4.1-inch touchscreen) was due out in Japan first. But most customers over here are still waiting for the “iPhone killer”.

Ah, the standard 10-inch netbook. It’s everywhere. With restrictions imposed by Intel and Microsoft on just how powerful these little machines can get, manufacturers have to focus more on aestethics, good keyboards, and battery life to differentiate themselves inside the overly crowded arena that is the 10-inch netbook.

Let’s start with Toshiba’s ad that looks like it came straight out of the early 90s. Pretty boring if you ask me. Aside from that the SV670 is quite stunning. For one thing, the 55-inch model would take up my entire living room and I’d be happy to watch from the next room. I can’t say too much about the local dimming and simulated 240Hz because all the Toshiba sets were looping the same video of the Rose Gardens in Portland, OR. The Deep Lagoon design might seem gimmicky, but when you’re in the store staring at hundreds of black trimmed TVs on the wall, the Regza is going to catch your eye. I can’t give it a proper “hands-on” because it didn’t seem to be calibrated correctly because the ZV650 seemed to be properly calibrated and the color on that particular set blew away the SV670. I was thoroughly impressed with Toshiba’s lineup that was re-announced today, but I’ll reserve final judgment until I’ve had proper time with each. In the meantime, check out the photos.

Toshiba is releasing three new lines of LCD TVs. The only one you care about is the SV670 LED line up though. The other two series, XV648 and ZV650, are just your standard top-tier LCDs TVs. But the SV670 might be something special.

While Toshiba’s had netbooks out in Japan for a while (and Europe, recently) the company’s been a wallflower here in the US, patiently watching as netbooks have evolved over the past year or so and taking notes in a leather-bound pad marked “Netbooks: Pros and Cons” that it carries around in its back pocket. Sure, it looks dumb when Toshiba takes out the pad in a restaurant to write down a new witty quote it’s never heard before, but it’s also helped in readying a US version of the NB200-series netbook.

Japan’s telecommunications giants NTT Docomo, KDDI au and SoftBank present new cell phones four times a year: spring, summer, fall and winter. All companies showcased their summer 2009 wares in the last few days, including some simply incredible devices.

The top 10 models across all carriers (chosen by yours truly) after the jump.

Japanese telecommunications giants SoftBank and Docomo unveiled their summer 2009 line-ups last week and were followed by the country’s No. 2 carrier, KDDI au, today. While SoftBank is to roll out 15 new cell phones this summer and Docomo even presented 17 models, KDDI au showed only 8 new candy bars [JP] in the morning. But some of these are amazing.

Another day, another netbook. This time around is the 10.1-inch Toshiba Mini NB200, which seems like it could be a high-end or even professional netbook if there is such a thing. An 1.6GHz N270 or 1.66GHz N280 Intel Atom is at the core and Intel 945GSE provides the graphics juice. Those commonplace specs alone do not bump this notebook up in our book, but the integrated 3g modem and Toshiba’s Sleep and Charge does.

We got a glimpse at some itty bitty fun-sized shots of the Toshiba TG02 and TG03 back when word of them first leaked. A week later, the embiggened versions of the same shots have emerged, and they’re looking.. well, about the same. Just bigger!

Electric vehicles usually have one major problem: The battery. But now Toshiba might have a new battery in development that could pave the way for better electric/hybrid cars in the very near future. Dubbed, SCiB (Super Charge ion Battery) Toshiba already shipped prototypes to a handful of Japanese, European and American automakers.

Mario and Luigi must be working some incredible overtime these days, what with all the leaks that keep springing up across the Interpipes. Lucky for us, until they get around to fixing all these holes, we all get to enjoy some exciting unknown product rumors.

According to the leaked info, Toshiba has 5 new 1 GHz Snapdragon + WinMo 6.5-based devices (2 smartphones/3 MIDs) planned for release over the coming year.

Toshiba announced a total of 10 new full HD Regza LCD TVs in Japan yesterday [JP]. The company just recently said it decided to step up production of LCD TVs. It’s new LCD TVs are marketed as the “Z series”, the ZX8000, ZH8000 and Z8000. They will be sold in Japan starting April 25 through July this year.

Toshiba Corp. (6502) announced yesterday it plans to convert Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology (TMD) into a wholly owned subsidiary. TMD is an LCD manufacturing joint venture formed by Toshiba and Matsushita (now Panasonic). The joint venture produces around 10% of small LCD panels. It’s second only to Sharp in this market segment.

It looks like Sharp is seeing its (near) future in LCD TVs and solar panels. The company tomorrow sets up Sharp Display Products Corporation (SDP), a subsidiary based in Osaka. In addition, Toshiba will be partnering with Sharp to step up production of solar panels. The picture shows a solar-powered LCD TV Sharp showcased in July last year.

It seems that FED (field emission display) technology is not going to be the successor of LCD and plasma. Toshiba gave up on FED and SED, respectively, as early as January 2007. The company stopped a joint venture with Canon, which also seems to have more or less stopped development in that area (at least there were no FED or SED-related news from Canon in the last couple of months).

Now FED gets the Sony axe, too.

Toshiba seems to really believe in fuel cells as an alternative to conventional ways of producing electricity. After announcing plans to commercialize portable fuel cells from next month just a few days ago, the company now said it wants to roll out Japan’s first fuel cell system for condominium units in 2013.

Japan’s biggest newspaper, the Nikkei, is reporting that Toshiba is finally ready to roll out portable fuel cells for the mass market (as of this writing, Toshiba’s Japanese website doesn’t have any information on this yet). The company even announced a fuel-cell powered cell phone in October last year, but it doesn’t seem likely we get to see that handset by the end of this month (as promised by Toshiba).

Toshiba Japan announced a new portable DVD player today [JP], the SD-P93DTW, which is equipped with a One-Seg digital TV tuner. The device is Japan-only at this point. But Toshiba sells the SDP93S in the US, which is essentially the same player minus the TV tuner (the tuner is useless outside Japan and Brazil anyway). And Americans have to pay a lot less for their player.