Way back in the dark day of CES 2011, we were in a position to lay hands on and have fun with some interesting new technology from Toshiba. They’d a prototype notebook available that was capable of glasses-free 3D like the Nintendo 3DS, however with a bigger screen and also the ability to track head movement and adjust viewing angles accordingly. The release of this 3D notebook continues to be an unusually quiet one. May be the 15-inch Qosmio F755 a sound design, or perhaps is there a reason why it has been unceremoniously dropped into the marketplace?

The type of glasses-free 3D that Toshiba employs within the Qosmio F755-3D290 has thus far been mostly limited to handhelds, like the odd 3D smartphone or even the aforementioned Nintendo 3DS. Toshiba even features a reasonably impressive bit of head-tracking technology that will shift the 3D viewing angle so long as the webcam can easily see you, at least once you’ve configured it. Why did Toshiba pretty much sneak this one to the market?

You’ll forgive me for my unprofessionalism, however the best word I’m able to think of for the Toshiba Qosmio F755′s configuration is “wonky.” After i reviewed Toshiba’s all-in-one, the DX735, I praised Toshiba to be able to produce a balanced system configuration which was well-suited to its intended purpose, however the F755 in any of its three shipping configurations may be the polar opposite.

The intense spot of the F755 may be the Intel Core i7-2630QM. The i7-2630QM and it is successor the i7-2670QM are, for me, the price/performance/power sweet spot from the mobile market at this time. The F755-3D290 configuration employs the i7-2630QM, the industry fast quad-core processor with Hyper-Threading, in a position to turbo up and supply plenty of juice on two cores, but additionally capable of being fairly frugal with power consumption. On top of that, the i7-2630QM is reasonably inexpensive and turns up in notebooks overall. OEMs like it, and I certainly wouldn’t be unhappy with it.

Unfortunately things find yourself being pretty screwy otherwise. Why just 6GB of DDR3 rather than an even 8GB, particularly with prices where they’re? Why the dismally slow 5400-RPM hard disk, borderline unforgivable in a $1,700 laptop? Why Atheros’s slow wireless solution rather than one of Intel’s more capable ones–or a minimum of give us something with support for 2 spatial streams and 5GHz radios? All of this, and then a Blu-ray rewriteable drive? A Blu-ray reader would’ve sufficed.

Users thinking about enjoying 3D Vision using the Qosmio F755 are going to be disappointed on two fronts. The very first is the anemic NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M. The 540M is okay for gaming at 1366×768 without 3D, but 3D Vision is extremely demanding on graphics hardware and also the 540M just isn’t going to work. Fortunately that doesn’t matter, because while Toshiba advertises 3D Vision support for that F755, it just plain fails. I actually checked other reviews plus they all ran into exactly the same problem; when you click “Enable 3D Vision” around the laptop, it does nothing. I’ve read that NVIDIA and Toshiba will work together on a 3D Vision driver for that F755, but it hasn’t materialized yet…3 months after the laptop’s release.

Finally, to include insult to injury, the F755 isn’t Optimus enabled. No intelligent switching between your Sandy Bridge IGP and also the GeForce GT 540M, and life of the battery suffers tremendously consequently. Small wonder the notebook arrived with little fanfare.