One of the cooler things we saw at Sir Howard Stringer’s Keynote this morning was the Sony VAIO P Series notebook. In a sort of Steve Jobs move, Stringer whipped the notebook out of his pocket and gave a quick rundown of the features. Hungry for more information, we headed down to the Sony booth in the afternoon to get a hands on look at the notebook.
2008 was the year of the netbook but as people get over the idea of mobility, they’re starting to look for solutions that offer the same amount of portability without compromising on features. Once we got down to the Sony booth we were sort of disappointed that there wasn’t more information on hand, but beggars can’t be choosers and it didn’t stop us from mauling it, taking out the battery and whatever else we could get away with while no one was looking.
One thing Stringer did say was that the P Series gives you the portability without compromising the size of the keyboard too much. When we tried it out we found that was true, but only to an extent. We bashed out a couple of lines in notepad and while the keys themselves were fine for the most part, the left and right click buttons were squished together in an awkward position, making it a little difficult to click. That aside, the track nub in the center gives smooth movement and scrolling without being overly sensitive.
The newest VAIO weighs 1.4 pounds, comes with WAN, LAN, integrated bluetooth connectivity, built in GPS and a high-res 8 inch ultra-wide LCD. As you can see in the pictures, there’s no model number but we hear availability in Europe is earmarked for sometime in February with pricing at about $900. Word on the grapevine is the P Series will come with up to 2 GB of RAM, a 128 GB SSD and a 1.6 GHz processor. No word on US availability yet.
