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

Noicvre, buiut././/.

[oever]

tjhe kleybpoard ois a vbit as,mall

I'll buy one...

[Wire Tap]

... if I mine comes with a cute Japanese girl hiding behind it. ;-)

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).

Re:Cute, yes...

[djmurdoch]

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...

Re:*ching ching*

[FrenZon]

With a base price of $2199....umm...yyeeeaaaahhhh

So buy it for USD $1329 from here, instead. Looks like a shop in Japan that ship direct to you (as opposed to Dynamism's ship to them then to you)

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