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

Offtopic: web page in Japanese

[steveha]

I took Japanese classes a few years ago. I tried looking at some web sites in Netscape 4.x on a Windows system. I even downloaded a few fonts to try to get it to work better. It never looked good.

Just now, using Galeon, I clicked on the link to the Japanese page, and oh my gosh wow! The whole thing looks like it should. Hiragana, katekana, kanji, English text, it's all there and it all looks like it should.

Kudos to the Mozilla and Galeon developers.

By the way, it still bemuses me how the Japanese like English words so much. They will use their Katekana phonetic alphabet and spell out English words by sound.

Their phonetic spellings look odd to English-speakers. In Japanese, the consonant sounds don't appear alone; you can never have just "k", it has to be "ka", "ki", "ku", "ke", or "ko". The sole exceptions are "m" and "n" (e.g. "Nisan" can end with just "n" instead of "nu"). There is no "l", so they use "r" for "l" when doing foreign words. They often swallow or drop the "u" sound, so a Japanese speaker pronouncing the word "mobairu" will say something like "mobile" (i.e. he will get it pretty much correct, even though the spelling looks odd to us).

Examples on that page: "katarogu PDF" is the link to the PDF Catalog; "rainuppu" is the link to the "lineup"; and the picture showing two hand thumb-typing says "mobairu gurippu sutairu" (mobile grip style).

Note that the name "Vaio" is very difficult for the Japanese to pronounce; the phonetic spelling is "Baio", much easier for them. Japanese doesn't have a "v" sound.

steveha