Sony Announces Transmeta Notebook

VF/VT Hunter was first with the news. Could you gush about a product announcement for us, Mr. Hunter? "Oh hell yes :) This link over at C|Net details Sony's plan to release a Transmeta-powered notebook by year's end. I KNEW I should wait! What's better, it will include a built-in digital camera. Add standard USB and iLink (aka Firewire) support which seem to be prevalent on most Sonys, plus Sony's reputation for making the coolest looking gizmo's, and I think I've found my next big purchase. It just better not come with a Winmodem." But since it's not a full-sized laptop, should we assume it will be full-featured? Update: 08/15 11:15 AM by michael : The Picturebook line of Vaios doesn't sell very well - it's too small to be useful as a "real" laptop. If only Sony were smart enough to put this chip in their regular Vaios, they wouldn't be able to keep them on the shelves.

Comments

Worried.

[sporty]

After owning a bit of sony hardware (phones and audio equpit.) and checking out Consumer Reports, they are third in defective hardware. Is this going to be a shot to the proverbial foot for Transmeta?

I'd rather IBM or someone more dependable. Hey, Panasonic can get into the laptop market, no? =)

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Re:Worried.

[BigBlockMopar]

After owning a bit of sony hardware (phones and audio equpit.) and checking out Consumer Reports, they are third in defective hardware. Is this going to be a shot to the proverbial foot for Transmeta?

I can't speak for Consumer Reports testing process, but I have seen similar sounding measurements of product "quality". Primarily, they survey repair shops and find out what makes and models they end up repairing the most.

The Sony/Panasonic/Toshiba/etc stuff is only apparently less reliable in this sort of study because people seldom bring broken Samsung/Gold Star/Funai/etc to the repair shop - they just bin it.

That's not to say that anyone makes good consumer electronics these days - it's all cheap, disposeable plastic crap. They're as expendable as a Honda or a Toyota. But I will say this, Sony stuff is usually pretty consistent.

For one thing, it's a rare Sony Trinitron TV set that doesn't make it to its 20th anniversary. Sadly, I'll have to wait another 19 years to see if last year's models make it that long. Note that in those 20 years, the TV set may have had to go in for a repair once. The no-name or off-brand stuff is long landfilled.

In a TV station I worked in, we had huge piles of Sony KV-1710 TV sets that were all over the building as on-air monitors and stuff like that. Nothing really serious, TV in the Green Room, General Manager's office, etc. These things were *always* on during the day, and lived a hard life. I must have put new picture tubes into half of them (the electronics just wouldn't die, even though the screens were burned in). Finally, we started to replace them as they broke. They'd usually pop a fuse or something and play dead, so I'd replace them with a new Sony KV-1926. People would hang around the engineering department, hoping that I'd fix one of the old KV-1710s for them to take home. And out of a fleet of thirty+ of them, I only ended up using two for parts - the rest got nice retirements.

One of the parts TV sets had come off the mobile truck, where it had been bolted up as the PROGRAM monitor over the sound guy's console. It bit the dust when one of the talent was driving the mobile truck and smacked it into an awning. A hole was torn through both the side of the truck and the side of the TV set. (Hint: No matter how loudly the weatherman begs to try driving the "big truck", never let him.)

The other parts TV set was just badly broken electronically (bad flyback transformer, horizontal output, damper, horiz oscillator and power supply regulator). I wasn't surprised it was dead. I was surprised that it was the *only one* that was really too far gone.

If Sony builds their computers like their TV sets (and, indeed, like most of their consumer and professional video equipment), if you treat it right, it'll last you a while.

Re:Worried.

[Amokscience]

According to one of the newsgroups (sorry don't remember the name) I lurked in for a while Sony laptops were excellent machines... until you had a problem. Then the almost universal opinion was that Sony's customer service 'sucked'. IBM on the other hand seemed to have both excellent products and very good service. Computers (and especially laptops) are NOT the same as a TV or monitor. With laptops you expose them to a great deal of potential jarring and abuse as oppose to a tv or monitor that may never move in the X years that you own it.

No, I don't have hard facts. Just reporting the general consensus that many of us base our buying decisions on. All of that said, I think Sony products are almost irresistably appealing once you get one in your hands.

Re:Worried.

[BigBlockMopar]

Really? Have the Trinitron tubes really been out that long? I don't know much about the TVs, but the Trinitron tubes in the monitors certainly don't last as long as a 'standard' CRT before the picture goes fuzzy, and I've seen a lot of them.

Sony has never made a color TV set that wasn't a Trinitron.

Remember, back in the late 1960s, the only kind of color TV picture tube there was was a "Delta". If you look at the front of a very old color TV set, you'll usually notice that the phosphor dots are arranged in little triangular patterns. That's in contrast to a more modern TV set where the picture tube has an inline gun, and the phosphors reflect that by being arranged in vertical stripes or segments.

Note that this doesn't apply to computer monitors. All VGA monitors I've ever opened have inline guns, and with the exception of the Trinitrons, they seem to have delta-type phosphors. (Like a four door car with three door handles, something doesn't add up. Weird.)

Anyhow, the prime advantage of the inline tube is that it simplifies convergence (making the red, blue and green guns all point at the same cluster of phosphors at the same time - look for color fringing at the corners of your TV sets and monitors to see misconvergence).

But Sony's inline tubes take it to the next level: instead of having three guns arranged in one row at the neck of the tube, a Sony Trinitron has *one* gun at the back, with three cathodes. In effect, it's a gun that shoots three different bullets at once. It's a lot easier to aim one gun than it is three; and so it's a great improvement on the three-gun inline systems.

Add to that the sharp corners and flatter screens that Sony was able to manufacture (with atrocious yield rates at first, BTW) and the early Trinitrons became very popular. Now, of course, Sony has improved on that with the ultraflat Wega (which still appears to be a kind of Trinitron) but I don't know anything about the CRT arrangements in their new line.

So, when Sony sold their first color TV sets in North America in 1969, they were all Trinitrons. (Wow. That was from memory, too, but I wanted to confirm it, and I did... Head to this link on Sony's website!

Sony's electronics were also way ahead at the time, too: in 1954 Sony sold their first transistor radios in North America, and were pioneers in transistorized TV sets. In 1969, the only other solid state (transistorized) color TV sets were Zeniths. Everybody else was still using all tubes or hybrids (tubes and transistors mixed), with the many reliability and efficiency problems that tubes have.

(Sidetracked...) When I was a kid, I had a 19" Motorola color TV set from 1972 that actually had a ?6BQ5? horizontal output tube. There was a damper tube, and a high voltage rectifier tube (1B3), and a high voltage regulator tube. And all of those tubes were driven off a little 16 pin DIP IC that sat in a tiny white socket right beside them. (This was back in the days when all ICs and transistors were socketed.)

As for Trinitrons dying sooner, nah, I don't think that's actually the case. When the color starts to fail (ie. white starts to go pink, and adjusting the bias and screen controls inside (do this *only* if you know what you're doing) won't bring it back), it's generally because the barium oxide coating is worn off the CRT cathodes. That takes a lot of use. All picture tubes have a finite lifespan, but usually the electronics surrounding the picture tube will die before it does.

In my experience, places where you see lots of Sony monitors (like the flight displays at Terminal 3 at Pearson International Airport) are also the places where they rack up the most hours. Of course you can expect them to go pink faster.

BTW, the "pink" color is actually a purplish-pink, caused by the fact that the green phosphors require the most energy (and therefore cathode lifespan) to light up. The blue is somewhat behind. So, it appears that the green goes first, and the blue emission starts to get low, leaving a field of mostly red. Hence the trademark pinky-purple color of a worn out CRT.

<sigh> I guess I'm a video geek.

Not full-sized

[Ratface]

The press release doesn't actually state that it's "not a full-sized laptop", it says that it's "slightly smaller than the company's current laptops".

For me that doesn't suggest any reduction in features, Sony's VAIO range generally comes with a great feature set and from those already listed, this doesn't sound too different.

I would *guess* that the reduced size could have as much to do with the Crusoe's reduced power consumption as anything else. At least I would hope that this helps it reduce the size.

One other thing - isn't is possible on a laptop to bypass a Winmodem and use a PCMCIA modem instead if one wishes? I would certainly hope so - any confirmation or denail of this would be interesting.

"Give the anarchist a cigarette"

Small != stripped-down

[Jeffrey Baker]

The vaio series has a history of packing tons of features into a small package. My z505hs has a 500 MHz processor, 256 MB of RAM, a 12 GB disk, built-in 100 Mbps ethernet, built-in audio, built-in Lucent winmodem (works with Linux!), infra-red port, 2 usb ports, a firewire link, a pcmcia slot, and a memory stick slot. All of that without any dongles or docking stations, in a < 4lb package.

In fact, the only thing that could make the z505 better is a less power-hungry processor. The stock battery in the z505 only lasts an hour under normal use.

As for the Vaio C1 series, it has almost all of the equipment that the z505 has, without the extra usb port and the built-in ethernet. It even has the same screen resolution (1024x768), albeit in a smaller size. With the Crusoe processor, that little 2-lb machine may be even more neat.

Ooooh, nifty.

[DebtAngel]

After following a few links on the Sony site, I dug up the following:

This product line, C1, exists, and it's first model powered by a Celeron 400. It's about the 10 by 6 inches, making it look like a really big WinCE device, only it runs 98 SE.

The standard battery lasts between one and two hours. That is, as you can imagine, pretty unacceptable. Moving to the Crusoe is a good move here, because can probably get another hour to 90 minutes out of it. Then, when upgrading to a "quad capacity battery", you can get about 12 to 16 hours out of it, which means you can use it most of the day.

And for those people bitching about it's small size, this is the market Transmeta was aiming for, so there. :)

Re:Default Operating Systems?

[xtal]

Linus for working at Transmeta and signing NDA's should be feeling pretty silly if he managed to bring Linux on to Sony notebooks..

Obviously you have never dealt with Sony. For the world: If you're running anything but the CD that came with your notebook Sony will not talk to you. Hey world: Sony's technical support SUCKS.

I run a oldschool P233 Sony Vaio 505 I picked up for a good deal online; It runs linux like a charm, it has a real modem, and one of these days I'll get the extended battery for it so I can get a 3-4 hour life (get about 1h 25m now, in linux. Would do better if I got the HD spinning down). It's ironic that a company with such HORRIBLE technical support makes one of the most linux-compatible notebooks (at least this particular model). Thank god it hasn't broken (although it really needs that extended battery and more memory :).

All you people that are drooling over the C1: Yeah, it runs linux, and yes, Linus has one, but the almighty himself couldn't get the specs on writing code for that little camera it comes with. Or the winmodem that's in it. Hopefully the transmeta version will have a Penguin on the side, but I doubt it.

I'll believe these will make good linux notebooks when I see it. Sony is very entrenched in the consumer electronics mentality, and in the consumer electronics world, you don't fuck with it, and likely, you don't even bother to get it fixed.

There's my rant for the day. To their credit: My 505 is the only piece of computer hardware I have ever had a female tell me was "Sexy". Cool. :)

Are you kidding, Michael?

[GregWebb]

These things may not have sold well before, but with one of those babys inside it...

I remember one of the UK PC mags - PCW IIRC - going mad over this when it first apeared, and I can see why. It's just so _cute_, that size and with that camera. I was sorely tempted when I saw a 233 model going for UKP900 a while back, but managed to be good :)

I've just got a Psion 5. Lovely machine, not without its problems - but neither was my Palm III. Gave up on that because I realised I needed a keyboard.

Now. A Psion 5 is already too big for a pocket. This isn't much bigger - certainly no bigger than an LG Phenom Express. Except it's got a 1024*480 colour screen rather than my Psion's 640*240 16 greyscale. It can run Windows so I don't have such a limited software range. And, with this chip, it'll now run all day.

Yes, it's heavier. Yes, it's more fragile. Yes, it's more expensive and yes, it won't power up instantly. But let's be honest here. If we're sensible with the install, Windows will still boot within 30 seconds, which is good enough nost of the time. It'll also be a lot faster. And you still have to be careful with PDAs. I cracked my Palm III's screen, for example...

They're not as stupid as they look, releasing it first in one of these. Were I a little richer, I'd look at one.

Too small for Americans

[Tet]

The Picturebook line of Vaios doesn't sell very well - it's too small to be useful as a "real" laptop.

I couldn't disagree more. It's pretty much the perfect size. A regular laptop is just too big to carry around all the time. The Vaio Picturebook line, like the Libretto before it, is pretty much ideal. A "real" laptop, as you call it, has no practical value as far as I can see. They're too big to be portable, and too underpowered for the desktop. Apparently, however, Toshiba were forced to withdraw the Libretto from the American market, because the general public couldn't cope with the small keyboard. I expect the picturebook line to go the same way. Sigh. From my point of view, the keyboard size is just right. It's quite big enough to type at full speed, unlike those found on traditional palmtops and many CE devices. It's worth noting that here in the UK, the smaller Vaios seem to be more prevalent than their full size brethren (although this is purely anecdotal -- I don't have sales figures). Perhaps it's a US thing. Either way, I'm still having to resort to importing my Libretoo ff1100V from Japan, 'coz that's the only place it's available anymore :-(

Re:Q: How can I know laptop can do linux before I

[LiamQ]

Have a look at Linux on Laptops. They link to Linux reports on just about every notebook model you'll find.