Toshiba demo'd its laptop-friendly HD DVD-RW drive in June this year and, six months on, the unit is at long last going to be built into a laptop.

The machine in question is Toshiba's own monster Qosmio G40, which goes on sale in Japan this Friday. The 17in notebook also contains a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo T7500 processor, 2GB of memory, two 200GB hard drives and an Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT graphics chip with 256MB of graphics memory attached.

Toshiba's Qosmio G40: now with HD DVD-RW

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The GPU drives the 1920 x 1200 display, which is more than enough for full HD pictures - though the G40 also has an HDMI port so user can hook the laptop up to an HD TV too. Or they can tune in using the laptop's two on-board tuners.

But it's that HD DVD-RW drive that's generating the most interest around the web. It reads and writes both burn-once HD DVD-R media as well as the rewriteable version in both single- and dual-layer forms. It'll also handled DVD±R/RW discs, DVD-RAM and CD-R/RW.

The G40 will retail for around ¥400,000 ($3538/£1752/€2450).