craig5320

Sony Vaio P-Series Review
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Today well be looking at the Sony P series netbook computer. Weve reviewed a plethora of netbooks to date including offerings from Dell, Asus and MSI but the Sony P brings a little something special to the table.

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IvanV

Thanks for the excellent review of a very appealing product.

I must say though that I feel that Sony has taken the "form before function" approach a little too far with it. The device is pretty and classy, it's very light, the screen is beautiful and they've even managed to give it a good keyboard and respectable running time, but that comes at a pretty high cost. The device is both more sluggish and much more expensive than numerous other netbooks. The choice of the pointing device reduces the usability further and I'm not even sure if the ultra-wide screen, although one of the main features of the device, is that practical. It has to be a step forward from the usual 1024*600 panels, but considering what the device will and won't be used for, and as the review showed it's hardly going to be watching movies but rather browsing instead, I'm guessing that quite often a good deal of the pixels is not really used, reducing the effective diagonal even further, which makes me wonder if a more conservative approach, a slightly larger screen with a more common 1366*768 resolution wouldn't be easier to read and more practical overall (the reviewer could testify on that), plus allow a touch-pad to be included.

This would change the appearance of the device and probably make it seem much less exceptional, but that's exactly my grief with it: it's pretty much special only as far as it's physical characteristics go, further than that, and it's more sluggish, less comfortable to use (at least in some ways) and more expensive than most other netbooks.

Still, people often choose partners primarily by their looks and forget about those other aspects, so why be so much more meticulous with netbooks?

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Mac Daddy

Great review and nice post Ivan

Other than the noted on the CPU and a few other small things it looks solid.

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IvanV

I've been thinking a bit about it and I got to the conclusion that this is a nice concept and that the next version could be a really good product.

Once CPUs make the next evolutionary step, we're likely to have a processor with just enough power to give us a smooth desktop experience without reducing the battery life. Also, adding touch screen capability would probably reduce the problem of hitting links in browsers and similar issues (until that happens, it would be nice if Sony supplied a small mouse with the netbook). I think that that way we'd get a really great gadget (probably what Intel has on mind when it talks about MIDs).

The general problem with these devices is that people want a pocket sized gadget that will still allow them to type and surf the web normally, in other words that have (as close as possible to) full sized screens and keyboards. Those two obviously don't go together very well, so we're always going to have to make some sort of a compromise, but this looks to me like a decent concept that will hopefully mature over the next year or so.

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If anyone has Portal 2 and hasn't played the co-op and wants to do me a favour, let me know (PM me or whatever).

Mac Daddy

I agree Ivan and in the review they mentioned a 1.6Ghz processor as an option to the 1.3G in this one. So looks like they are already thinking ahead which is a good thing

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"My mom said the only reason men are alive is for lawn care and vehicle maintenance." - Tim Allen

ET3D

Dynamism has the P Series with a 2.0GHz Atom. Considerably more expensive, but may be the right choice. Still, what would really help is NVIDIA's graphics acceleration.

Customgamer1

This is very cool, but way way to expensive.

It really is not that much smaller than a netbook for all the extra cost involved. If they could drop the price about $350-$400 I would be very interested!

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Zardon

I don't think that will be happening - to be fair to Sony the screen quality is worth a good $200 over all the other netbooks alone. It is one of the nicest screens I have seen however it might prove a little stressful on some eyes due to the insane resolution for the size.

BlueMak

Good review.

I don't think I would buy this no matter the money I had. If I had the money to spend £800 or £1200 on a low performance netbook, I might as well buy an Apple Air which will run circles around it. For me this P series is a huge waste of money. No matter how good the screen is, you need to display something on it and from the looks of it, it can only cope with text, which is the worst thing one would want to see a lot of in this tiny screen.

I generally like Sony products, but this feels more like a joke or at best an experiment.
Oh, and I wish companies would stop using Atom CPUs. Too slow.

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