Sony's P-wee
Cantle Flawier at Thursday 8th January filed under Hardware
Arriving late to the party, Sony launched their small netbook sized laptops yesterday at a pre-CES event in Las Vegas. Drawing the most attention in what was a relatively drab press conference, the Sony Vaio P Series does seem to be one of the most desirable notebooks to be announced since Apple's MacBook Air.
The 1.4 pound, 8-inch machine will sport an Intel Atom processor, come with either an 80Gb hard drive or a 128Gb SSD unit have Microsoft Vista with an "instant on" Linux interface and be available in five colours (green, red, white and both matte and gloss black). The P Series is well connected too with GPS, 3G (in the US this would be connected to the Verizon network), WiFi, Bluetooth and LAN.
Although available in the US from the end of this year, Sony representatives were unable to tell us when this will arrive on our shores. Although the State-side model utilises Verizon's network, it won't be sold through their stores, so this doesn't look like a carrier subsidised device.
There seems to be enough features and a decent keyboard/screen in the P Series to shrug off any suggestions of this being an expensive toy, however Sony representatives were keen to point out that the P Series isn't meant for any processor heavy usage - i.e. we're still in netbook territory here. The choice of Vista was put down to it being the current mainstream operating system, a point which is still highly debatable.
The 1.4 pound, 8-inch machine will sport an Intel Atom processor, come with either an 80Gb hard drive or a 128Gb SSD unit have Microsoft Vista with an "instant on" Linux interface and be available in five colours (green, red, white and both matte and gloss black). The P Series is well connected too with GPS, 3G (in the US this would be connected to the Verizon network), WiFi, Bluetooth and LAN.
Although available in the US from the end of this year, Sony representatives were unable to tell us when this will arrive on our shores. Although the State-side model utilises Verizon's network, it won't be sold through their stores, so this doesn't look like a carrier subsidised device.
There seems to be enough features and a decent keyboard/screen in the P Series to shrug off any suggestions of this being an expensive toy, however Sony representatives were keen to point out that the P Series isn't meant for any processor heavy usage - i.e. we're still in netbook territory here. The choice of Vista was put down to it being the current mainstream operating system, a point which is still highly debatable.