Sony Vaio GT3/K: You Spilled Your Laptop on my Camcorder

Anonymous Howard writes "This article talks about Sony's new, limited production Vaio GT3/K. It's a mixture of laptop and full fledged camcorder that uses the Transmeta 600mhz Crusuoe chip. Weighing in at 2.4 lbs, this hybrid has an amazing battery life of up to 17 hours, 30 GB drive, ATI Rage Mobility-M1 and 128 MB of RAM, and a swiveling screen. This is definately a very unique device, one that completely blows away Sony's previous attempts of the laptop/video combination machines, mainly due the fact that the video camera is not a wimpy little video lense, but an actual full fledged digital camcorder."

Comments

Um, why?

[I Am The Owl]

So, instead of a decent laptop and a decent camera, I can get a combination that does both poorly and probably costs only slightly less. Wow, what a gain.

Thanks, but I'll stick with Firewire and my Canon GL2

Why all the hybrids?

[inaeldi]

I've never understood the fascination of combining digital products together. Cell phones with the Internet, laptops with cameras, etc. The way I see it, if you want a laptop, buy a laptop. If you want a camera, buy a camera. If you want both, buy both. Not only do you get a better selection by doing it that way, but you'll probably end up with 2 good products as opposed to 1 mediocre hybrid. Just my $0.02 anyways.

Re:Why all the hybrids?

[russellh]

I've never understood the fascination of combining digital products together. Cell phones with the Internet, laptops with cameras, etc. The way I see it, if you want a laptop, buy a laptop. If you want a camera, buy a camera.

They are experiments, a celebration of both people and technology. nobody knows what will work, really, and people always find unintended uses for stuff. so yeah, a swiss army knife is an inferior replacement for all the separate components, but the swiss army knife is about convenience, not being the best corkscrew or tweezer in the world.

A Bit Late

[NickisGod.com]

Nice gadget, but the war is more or less over for now.

..."The Ultimate in Embedded Journalism Gear"...

I'll pass

[YrWrstNtmr]

Little laptop with a swivel screen? OK! (think car PC)

Reasonable quality digital camcorder? kewl!

Trying to stabilise the camera with the added, needless weight of a laptop? No thanks.
A camera that has to be upgraded when the laptop is passe'? No thanks
Sending my laptop back when the camera dies? No thanks
Or sending the camera back when my laptop HD dies? No thanks.

Re:Note to Sony Re: combination laptop camera

[evilviper]

The good thing about computers, is the general purpose nature of them allows you to add perhiperals at a fraction of the cost of standalone devices. I can spend $25 on a CD-R drive for a computer, or pay several hundred for a standalone CD-R device.

This camera has some distince advantages because it is not standalone. However, it seems like they could have done this in a much better way. Just have the guts of a camcorder (that doesn't work on it's own), and have it hook-up to a notebook with a PCMCIA adapter... I don't think Firewire is quite fast enough, but maybe that would be an option, too.

Re:Why does SONY love Windows ME so much?

[evilviper]

What I wonder about, is their support of Windows. If you look at anything they offer, they usually only have support for Windows... USB MiniDisc recoders come to mind.

They are not a software company, so I don't see why they don't release some specs on their devices, but they don't.

Re:128 whole megabytes of RAM?

[ocelotbob]

Obviously it's for casual shooting, probably would be a great vacation movie system. Take it along, videoblog your trip without having to carry around two devices wherever you go. I can definitely see the utility of this device in the amateur video editing market. Though the memory constraints lead me to believe that it probably would work better with a much smaller OS. Toss ME, throw on a very tight version of Linux and 256MB would be more than plenty RAM to handle a video editing session. From a consumer standpoint, it's simply unfortunate that MS abandoned NT4, because there's definitely a market for small OSes on devices that don't necessarily have the restrictions that CE was designed around.

Just because OS makers have sacrificed tight code to the almighty god of eye candy doesn't mean that it's not possible to live with "just" 256MB. Turn off the eye candy, and you'll see that there's a lot you can do in tight memory situations without sacrificing performance.

hybrid devices

[roalt]

The problem with these hybrid devices is that that:

1. It's probably not the best laptop you want...
2. It's probably not the best camera around you want... (680,000 pixel CCD is not exactly top)

Instead of mixing these 2 devices together, I suggest just let those two device support some kind of wireless protocol (WiFi or something similar) so they can have the same functionality as this device, but they need not be connected to eachother physically...

Okay, it might add up a bit to the weight (extra battery pack for the 2nd device), but then, you don't need to carry the whole device in your hand...

17 hours?

[vanyel]

Personally, I think most of the interest around it is because the batteries are supposed to last 17 hours. Who cares about the camera...