Sony PCG-U1

hexdcml writes "Just found this whilst browsing, Sony has now brought out the My Little Vaio range, (probably for rich kids..tsk) All I can say is WOW, this thing is tiny. Makes me wanna ditch my lurvely little iBook and get this! The site's in japanese, so you'll need to translate (for those how are non-japansese literate) using Babelfish or something." Dynamism.com has specifications in English.

Comments

very pretty, and pretty amazing

[blamanj]

I might even consider replacing my Newton if it weren't for the price
...if it had a built-in microphone
...and if it had decent battery life
...and if it had handwriting recognition
...and it didn't come with a bloated desktop OS
...and did I mention the price?

Why you shouldn't trade your ibook for a vaio

[seanadams.com]

I have a powerbook and a VAIO (model 503GCX or something). Originally I bought the VAIO because I needed a good Unix laptop, and both LinuxPPC and OSX were not up to snuff at the time. Now I've switched to OSX for pretty much everything. Anyhoo, here's my experience with VAIO vs (i|power)book:

• VAIOs have absolutely horrible keyboards. Why do most laptop makers feel that they're doing us a favor by rearranging all the keys from what we're used to on our desktop machines?
  
• the Vaio is thin, which is nice, but you sacrifice batterly life, built-in CDROM, and built-in standard expansion ports - gotta use dongles.
  
• utterly useless Sony proprietary memory stick port
  
• poor mechanical design. To get to the hard drive it takes about 20 minutes of carefully removing snap-in panels, and about 12 screws on the underside of the thing. Once you get the thing open, there are all kinds of little wires strung everywhere for speakers, trackpad, jog dial, etc. These have to be carefully disconnected in order to get the case open and get to the disk. Same sort of BS for swapping memory.
  
• clunky power cord. the new white ibook power supplies are very slick. I wish I could get one for my bronze powerbook, but they're a little different so I hear.
  
• no built in 802.11 option. Gotta have that stupid antenna nub hanging off the side.
  

I don't know what kind of improvements Sony might have made since I bought my Vaio, but I can't imagine they're anywhere near up to speed with Apple yet. I'm comparing a powerbook and a Vaio that were bought around the same time.

These are all the reasons why I don't get excited about the ever smaller/flimsier/less expandable offerings from Sony. If you want the mother of all laptops, get yourself a Mac, and take your pick between Linux (haven't tried the new Mandrake PPc yet - looks sweet) or OSX (I'm a sworn Mac convert now).