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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.
With a base price of $2199....umm...yyeeeaaaahhhh
A 128mb RAM upgrade is.....$399
A toy for the rich kids is right!
Seriously, I'd have to agree with the submittor here. I am all for giving your kids the best, but kids in the My First X demographic (under 8? at some point primary colors get embarrassing) don't really have a use for a laptop. Even if they did, a retired laptop (even from ebay) would probably a better choice than this product, which just screams "status symbol."
I didn't get a current system until college, always learning on and using yesteryear's tech. It's a good way to go, b/c you don't take the cutting edge hardware for granted. I think it made me more aware of issues like backwards compatability, which is important.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
How on Earth do you control the mouse on that thing?
The guy is typing with his thumbs! And the icons look pinhead-size. This is all very neat how we can shrink things smaller and smaller, but... ergonomics anyone? How about keeping your eyesight past your 20's?
I think the whole PDA/Tablet PC/Subnotebook thing is in general pretty silly. For general use they are horrible. Better to get something like the Hitachi WIA with an input device like the Twiddler and keep your wrists and eyes healthy.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
all the other junk you need to bring along: power supplies, extra battery, mouse, network cord, phone cord, teething ring...
I feel the same way about laptops in general - there are some out there that solve almost all of this, however. Personally I carry the following:
- white ibook
- thin little ethernet cable
- power brick (into which apple conveniently put cable management)
And that's it. Nothing else. Occasionally I bring a mouse, but not often.I suppose that leads me to a point about this Sony laptop we're supposed to be discussing: no builtin ethernet, no builtin wavelan, no builtin modem. Hmm. That would drive me insane, as I would end up carrying two or three pcmcia cards and their dongles around with me, and that's when things get broken in my backpack. I'd forgive it if it had builtin wavelan. In fact, that would be marvelous. It doesn't, however. And, I might add, I actually had a Sony SR7k (followed by an SR27k) for a year and a half, and I sold it in favor of an iBook for this exact reason. Oh well.
Moral of the story: I'm keeping my iBook. :) You can have it when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
- The market there is (proportionally) more interested in miniaturization for its own sake.
- The initial prices for high-end consumer electronics are higher than in the U.S., so they can afford more of a risk.
- The market is smaller than in the U.S., so it costs less to launch something new.
The latter two are important because the smaller devices generally involve more custom engineering, and thus have a higher initial cost and greater risk to the company.While I'm no fan of Sony as a company, one has to admit that they occassionally do something right.
::goes to take a shower::
It might be better if Sony's revenue stream dropped off entirely, but I consider 2nd-best to be a relocation of its revenue stream away from music. Since fewer computers (especially these things) will be sold than CDs and at a narrower profit margin, buying one of these as opposed to the eqivelant price in CDs gives Sony less money.
Ok, so I'm an apologist. I confess, I thought of buying it. EEEEEEEEE. I feel so dirty.
-knots
Anarchy$ dd if=/dev/random of=~/.signature bs=120 count=1
I'm typing this on a Sony SRX77 running Redhat 7.2 right now. IT'S AWESOME! 2.76 pounds, 4 hours of battery life, 1-1.5 inches thick, and fast as hell in linux.
.
The install was kind of a pain, but the end result is a fast, super-portable linux box that makes iBook folks drool. I've run Apache, MySQL, and mod_perl for client demos on this, and it's pretty impressive. .
I honestly wouldn't want a smaller laptop than the SRX77, though.
Tiny keyboards only allow one finger at a time typing. You can't get much work done on it
I can touch-type on the Libretto 70 keyboard which has a 14.5mm key pitch. I'd guess I could do it on this 14mm keyboard too. Once on the shuttle bus from an airport to a conference, I was sitting beside someone who thought I'd never be able to type on it. We had a race, which I won (or I'd never be telling this story, obviously).
There was a big advantage in having the computer not take up much space, so my hands weren't as cramped as his. This is also an advantage on planes in economy class.
and it'll cramp your game playing.
The game playing also affects how much work you get done...
What the hell does this mean?
Babelfish is col and all, but I can't wait until AI's are advanced enough to translate thigns properly.
"Me and my girl named bimbo . . . limbo . . . spam" - Captain Beefheart.
The English trademark "my first Vaio" gives a different impression of the device, at least to native English speakers, but native English speakers are not the primary audience for this.
Don't forget that in Japan, English is "cool". They will use English phrases, without necessarily understanding the phrases fully.
I think Kanji is "cool", and I would love to have a T-shirt with a few Kanji characters on it. Same thing with them, only with English. Most Japanese may not even care what "My First Vaio" means.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I'm sure someone else will mention this before my reply gets submitted, but to clear this one up:
:) Certainly easier than for English in the average case.
:P But that's a different story.
Japan uses three ideographic alphabets, hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana and katakana are small sets, and non-ambiguous. On a japanese keyboard you use a shift key to choose which you're typing in, then input them phonetically.
Kanji is the set of imported chinese characters. Japan uses a small subset of traditional chinese characters called the "Joyou" character set. (My spelling could be awful on that) It's got around 1900 characters that are in common use, and an additional few hundred characters used just for names. (It's changed quite a bit in the past few decades since I last studied Japanese formally, so take those numbers with a grain of salt.)
The kanji _are_ ambiguous, that is, the same pronounciation can have multiple character representation. But with so many possible pronounciations and so few characters (relatively) it doesn't take long to tab through your options when you input one. Generally the way to input kanji is to type in the pronounciation, then the word processor guesses the one you want, then if neccesary you tab through the rest of the options to find the other one. It sounds a little slow, but the ai's are getting better and better, so it's really getting smooth and easy.
In general, Japanese is actually a very computer-friendly language. It's grammatically strict, making contextual inference fairly simple. It's non-tonal and non-inflexive, so voice recognition is surprisingly easy.
Now, Chinese is a whole different matter. It's the source of most internationalization angst for the pacific rim.