Toshiba Planning Blu-Ray Player By End Of 2009

How long is an appropriate period of mourning before you move on?  If you're Toshiba, and you've been mourning the failure of HD-DVD, the answer is apparently seventeen months: according to Japanese paper Yomiuri Shimbun the company is planning its first Blu-ray player for release by the end of 2009. 

This first model is likely to hit Japan initially, where as of winter 2008 the high-definition format was tipped to have achieved 50-percent market share.  A Blu-ray recorder is expected to follow shortly after, since the standalone devices account for more than 70-percent of market share.

It's unclear how much business Toshiba have sacrifice during their waiting period, but their initial plans to "drive mass market access to high definition content [with] high capacity NAND flash memory, small form factor hard disk drives, next generation CPUs, visual processing, and wireless and encryption technologies" has obviously failed to deliver as great a profit as they believe Blu-ray might.  No word on when we might expect to see Toshiba Blu-ray products reaching the US and Europe.

[via PC World]