The W Series is Sony's late venture into the lucrative netbook business, and they're distinguishing themselves from the rest of the pack by going 'green'. According to the release, Vaio W contains approximately 20% of reprocessed plastic made from DVD and CD waste, and has a snappy looking accessory case made from 100% recycled PET that got Jill's seal of approval.

The Y Series is the higher, all - arounder with only one model at the moment.

The CW Series is the lower, 'fun' series with designs for guys and gals.

Then here's the S Series, another all - around, more powerful model.

And finally we get down to the more interesting ones, starting with the F series of which there's only one model, the VPCF116FG. It's marketed as a 'multimedia powerhouse', and comes relatively cheap compared for one at P90k. It's also got an Intel i7 processor, Blu-Ray, a nice 16.4" screen and a numpad - the first laptop I've seen with one I think.

Strangely however I can't understand why it doesn't have TV-in
ports (ie. cable or RGB), a crucial component for anyone who wants to do multimedia. I guess whoever wants to work their videos with this will be focusing on uploading to the internet or burning to CDs or DVDs, but not outputting or getting input from cable.

The 2nd and most notable of all the Vaio releases has to be of course, the P150k Z Series, of which there is no link on the Sony website yet (links only lead to older Z models).

It's got a backlit keyboard (something I think laptops should have as standard), and is unibody in design,

made from a single chunk of aluminum.

I've always loved unibody designs and praised the heck out of the Macbooks that come with unibodies. The structural integrity it provides guarantees durability to last a lifetime, and it's a pity we have to pay a premium for this.

But the true innovation going on here is the SSD (solid-state drive) storage. Rowena was right though on how limited the 128gb. capacity was, P150k should buy you much, much more.

SSD however, is really special in the sense it does not have any moving parts and therefore does away with all that bogs down a hard disk. Theoretically because it has no parts that swivel or cause wear and tear on one another, it should therefore never wear out as well.

We're talking space-age stuff here, literally. If you would launch a spaceship out you'd want to keep its data on machines that never ever break down, and your chances improve incrementally if you remove components that have moving parts in it, hence SSD is the logical choice (yes I watch too much Star Trek and yes I really gave it that much thought.).

A short interview with the tech guy on hand revealed it had 2 SSD slots of 64gb. each, running at Raid 0, representing just 1 drive on the OS (Windows 7). If I were to test this baby, I'd run several concurrent hi-res videos as well as data transfers of several hundred gigabytes each, and run a hard disk equivalent beside it to see the difference. The Sony crew at the launch missed out on a chance to show what SSD could really do, I think.

‹ previous

83 of 169

next ›