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Toshiba may push its HD DVD format by installing appropriate optical drives into its notebooks. Toshiba's senior vice president Hisatsugu Nonaka said that the company would integrate HD DVD optical drives into "all" of its laptops next year: "The demand is there: people want to watch their favorite movies in high-definition on the road." According to Gartner market researcher, Toshiba commanded 4.1% of the global PC market in Q1 2007, up 0.3 points year-over-year and increasing its shipments by 15.3% annually. The total available market of personal computers (which includes desktop PCs, mobile PCs and x86 servers) was approximately 62.719 million, which means that Toshiba supplied about 2.57 million of computers in Q1 2007.

HD DVD supporters like Acer and HP, the world's third (6.8% with 4.26 million systems shipped in Q1) and first (17.6% with 11 million machines supplied) makers of computers, have much larger market shares and have not announced support of HD DVD for all of their systems next year. The only computer maker who supports only Blu-ray among the Top 5 makers is Dell (13.9% market share, shipped 8.7 million of systems in Q1 2007). Given that HD DVD drives are more expensive compared to typical DVD/CD devices, installing them into all systems may increase prices and eventually decrease their market share.

News source: Xbit Laboratories

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