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? =)

---

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.

[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.

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 :-(