Sony Vaio X is World's Lightest Notebook

Say what you want about Vaio notebooks, but one thing you can't deny is that they have style. Sony today announced what it claims to be the world's lightest notebook – the Vaio X series.

The X series features a lightweight carbon-fiber chassis, helping its starting weight of 1.6 pounds (with standard battery) and a thickness of just over a half-inch thin. It has a 16:9 11.1-inch screen with a 1366 x 768 resolution, which Sony says is scratch-resistant.

The unit’s touchpad features a multi-touch functionality for zoom in and out, pictures flipping, rotate items clockwise and counterclockwise, and scroll vertically and horizontally.

The X Series also integrates wireless 3G Mobile Broadband from Verizon Wireless, but of course a subscription is required. One rather unique feature in the space is real-time GPS functionality for mapping, which will support the United States or Canada right out of the box.

For storage, the X Series incorporates a solid state drive in either 64 GB or 128 GB capacity.

As for the CPU, Sony lists a 2 GHz Intel processor, but upon further inspection, we're fairly sure that it's an Atom on an Intel chipset. Sadly, that means no fancy GPU, but we suppose that asking for an Nvidia Ion in this thing would be like asking for perfection.

The standard battery will power the machine for up to 3.5 hours, which isn't bad, but the super-extended capacity battery will run for up to 14 hours. The best news is that the Vaio X will ship with both batteries in the box. Of course, the super extended battery will expand the size of the notebook, but all-day computing does have its price.

The Vaio X Series notebook will come in two colors, black and gold, and start at about $1,300.