Sony’s Shapely VAIO P Series Netbook Sweet on Size
By Erik Miller
Sony’s entry into the steaming netbook market shares a lot in common with small netbooks running Intel Atom processors, but Sony’s VAIO P Series netbook is a more refined unit that aims itself at the crowd with excess cash. While many of the popular netbooks are selling for under $400, if not squeaking under $300, Sony’s P Series retails for about $900.
At a feathery 1.4 pounds, Sony says it’s the lightest 8-inch notebook on the market, though to be fair, most other netbooks are coming in with 8.9-inch or even 10.2-inch screens. Still, that 8-inch VAIO P Series screen packs a lot of pixels: at 1600 x 768, the LED backlit display is quite a bit sharper than the industry standard 1024 x 600 screens. And it’s all packed down into a sleek rectangular package that will barely cover a business envelope.
The processor is a 1.33 GHz intel Atom processor, which is a bit slower than many of the 1.6 GHz processors in other netbooks. The hard drive is 60 GB, with an available 128 GB SSD option, and it packs 2 GB of DDR2 SDRAM.
It would be nice to have a touchpad, but the built-in WAN 3G mobile broadband antenna, 802.11n Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth are all packaged up very nicely. For instance, the GPS is alive — if you’re looking for a restaurant near you, simply query up the restaurant and the GPS will automatically find where you are and give you directions, no Internet required. Very nice
With the VAIO P Series, Sony is distancing itself from the low-end Netbook crowd. The company has packaged in a webcam, Windows Vista, and a cool instant-on technology: you can boot up the Sony VAIO P Series into Sony’s Xross Media Bar interface so you can listen to music and view video, photos, and the Web in seconds.
The P Series comes in four slick colors — white, red, green, or black. The biggest drawback is easily the $900 price tag — cough — and Windows Vista is enough to give a good many pause. Some early reports on the web are saying Windows 7 runs pretty well, though.
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Filed Under: Envy
About the Author: Erik Miller is a contributing writer for 