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Sony X505/SP Notebook Review
John Gaule writes "Earlier it was mentioned on Slashdot that Sony has introduced the worlds thinnest laptop, the Sony X505 which weighs just under 2lbs. Designtechnica has reviewed this system and compares it to the JVC Interlink 7310, Panasonic W2 and Sony TR1A laptops. Apparently Sony had to have a custom motherboard configured to get the CPU and hard drive in the right position for cooling. There is also no integrated WiFi but it uses an 802.11g WiFi PC Card."
The full review on one page is available here.
:-)
Also, I must say, that is quite the small laptop. And you can see the fingerprints all over it in one of the photos on the main article.
There are other images available here as well.
Looks like Apple will be going back to the drawing board. The iBooks look pretty thick in comparison.
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
"Almost" broke in half? Usually, smaller and lighter devices don't hit the ground as hard. It would be unusual to have a featherweight laptop to break due to its light weight. Do you have pictures of the damage?
I know slashdotters (like myself) love Sony's offerings... they're cool and neat looking, but remember that Sony is supporting the RIAA in all of the lawsuits. Also, the MemoryStick media that they back (and surely put in this laptop) is much more expensive than CF or SD or anything else.
:) Then again, maybe they didn't suck in 1997.
Also, I just plain haven't had good luck with Sony products:
My NX60 stopped working one day for no reason (didn't drop or crush it), my stereo shocks me when i touch the case (so that's gone), my brother's PS2 died for no reason, my coworker's sony laptop's keys [letters on the keyboard] have all rubbed off ("how can I type now!?" "remember where the keys are" "what!!???"), etc, etc, etc.
My Multiscan200sf monitor is holding up quite nicely; that's a well-made piece of machinery
Note that I'm not flaming or trolling, I just think that most people on slashdot would be better-served by choosing a more open vendor than Sony.
My other car is first.
No direct quote as the article is now Slashdotted... However, they ask about inspiration for the carbon fiber. Oh come on, we all know carbon fiber is rad on your tricked out import racer, so why wouldn't it look just as cool on your laptop?
I dont know but IMO a smaller/thinner notebook is a very specialized product for a small market. I personally have a Dell Inspiron 4150 and I think it weighs in around 5-7lbs, but I think it is a perfect weight/size. When you go smaller you start to lose drives (ie, cdrom, etc..), I/O connections, and also the laptop is so light that if you *accidentally* snag your power cord then its to the floor w/ the laptop. I hate the devices that are too small... PDA/phones that try to be laptops (or laptops that try to be palm/small sized) are less user friendly.
The page seems to be dead, Jim, but here's another source of info on the X505.
My God. $4,000 who is going to buy this? P-Diddy? Martha Stewart?
ok, with the keyboard slammed against the outside edge of the deck, how the heck am I supposed to use this in my *LAP*?
Come on Sony.. move the keyboard back so I can rest my palms on the deck, and hold the laptop on my lap at the same time...
-Mikey
Hmmmm...a new theorum is born:
Slashdotters can't spell theorem.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Same velocity, different momentum, though, right?
I have a thin v505 that is less than 6 months old, has been treated extremely gently, and is already in need of touchpad replacement/repair (the cursor just skips all over and simply does not accurately track finger movement). This is an annoying and widespread enough problem to warrant those considering purchase of a 505 to perhaps think twice. And if you do, definitely get that extended warranty (but that may just go without saying in laptop purchasing).
It's pretty cool, I'll give it that. But at $3500 or $4000 (depending on which case material you go with) it's just too expensive and too feature limited to be something I would go for.
No trackpad (have to use trackpoint or external mouse).
No built-in floppy or optical drive.
Have to use dongles for LAN and VGA out.
Have to use PC Card for 802.11.
Only a 20GB hard drive.
Max of 512MB RAM.
1 GHz Centrino CPU.
All your paying for is thinness and lightness. That may be enough for some, but not me. Get rid of all the dongles, include a CD drive, beef up the specs a bit and then we can talk. I don't care if you have to make it a little thicker and heavier -- it needs to be useful!
I suspect they're going for the mobile professional market. Marketing guys that will pay out the nose for the smallest, hippest item. Good luck to 'em.
I got one of these. It weighs slightly more than the Sony, but has a Transmeta 933Mhz CPU, integrated 100baseT and 802.11b, 2 USB 2.0 ports, 10.1" TFT, and a touchpad. It runs Linux with no problem, except that the ALi sound chip doesn't support SPDIF, yet the sound driver expects this chip to support SPDIF and tries to initialize those ports with colorful results. :) A few minutes' hacking on the driver source, and that problem was solved.
With the bigger battery, its weight goes up to a whole 2.9 lbs, but it runs for 9 hours.
Edith Keeler Must Die
I dont know but IMO a smaller/thinner notebook is a very specialized product for a small market. I personally have a Dell Inspiron 4150 and I think it weighs in around 5-7lbs, but I think it is a perfect weight/size. When you go smaller you start to lose drives (ie, cdrom, etc..), I/O connections, and also the laptop is so light that if you *accidentally* snag your power cord then its to the floor w/ the laptop. I hate the devices that are too small... PDA/phones that try to be laptops (or laptops that try to be palm/small sized) are less user friendly.
All these comments saying "What do you expect from a 3+ foot-drop" Valid point but it doesn't change the fact that I will never own another Sony. The one that I had (also an ultra-portable or whatever they call it these days) would drop screws like crazy. The battery went kaput very fast. The hard-drive made that terrible "I'm about to fail noise". Bad, bad product.
So, how about the service. Non-existent. I was promised shipping boxes and RMA tags on no less that four occasions and never received a single one.
There is good news though, someone broken into out house a stole this piece of shit. Our insurance paid replacement cost, which allowed me to get a Dell. Been pretty happy with that.
For another thread of unhappy Sony owners check this out.
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
What do they mean by custom designed motherboard? Is there some sort of standard for notebook motherboards? I thought they were all custom designed. Last time I checked my crappy Dell notebook had a custom motherboard in it too. I think maybe that was some kind of hype statement?
I've had 3 VAIOs none of which have broken or are in any way flimsy.
I can understand some people want laptops with lots of drives etc, but personally I find once I've got everything I need installed on the machine I rarely need a CD drive for anything since new software gets transferred via the network. Different strokes and all that of course.
A few years ago, I baught a Sony VAIO laptop. It cost about $3000. As was standard with Sony at that time, it came with a one year warranty.
Almost exactly one month out of warranty, I started having problems. The computer would start, stay on for a very short time (usually less than 5 minutes) and then it would shut off.
Thinking some part may be drawing too much power, I tried disconnection every possible part that could be disconnected. However, this did not solve my problem. I finally succumbed to calling the support department, which of course had no clue and recommended I send my laptop in to be serviced.
I sent my laptop in as they said, and got notification that it had been received at the service department. A week passed, and I had not gotten any indication as to the status. I called support, gave them my ticket number, and asked them what was going on. They had no idea, and nothing had been logged. A couple days later I called again, and got the same result.
At this point, I became rather upset, and demanded they call me back by the end of the next day to tell me what was going on. They were kind enough to call me back, but not smart enough to figure out the problem. They said it would cost me $2200 dollars to have the problem "fixed" which I'm sure at that cost meant sending me a refurb unit.
This was 1 month out of a year long warranty, and I was furious and demanded better service. At this point, I could have gotten a computer that was twice as powerful for the same price they were going to charge me for "repairs." Unfortunately I got nowhere in my requests for fair compensation. In fact, I had to pay $60 dollars to cover services rendered and have my unfunctioning laptop shipped back to me.
$3000 dollars got me use of a laptop for one year and one month. This thing had minor wear as it served mainly as a desktop replacement. After dealing with Sony, and being a loyal customer of their other products, I kindly told them to fuck off. I have never spent another dime on Sony products.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
The thing got yanked off a desktop when somebody tripped over the power cord during a reboot. It hit the floor on it's side on battery power after dropping 3 feet and never even hickuped while rebooting. I picked it up, plugged it back in, and went back to work. This was when the laptop was ~1 month old.
The only thing I've ever had to do to it as far as service was have the display hinge replaced when it was roughly 2 and a half years old. It was still under normal warranty. Service went like this:
I've had the same problem with my iBook, which I'm typing this on, which was 8 months old at the time. For starters I was seriously pissed to be having problems with a system less that a year old. Service went like this:
I have to say IBM's service makes Apple's look like a bad joke. IBM picked up and returned my laptop in a period of three days. Apple's service for the same problem involved two car trips and a nine day wait. I was also upset that a problem that's taken around 2 to 2 and a half years to develop on the two Thinkpads I've owned occured on my iBook in less than a year... and seems to be starting again at a year and a half... not to mention the battery which died at 13 months (which is not covered by an Apple Care extended warranty, so I had to replace it out of pocket). Now if only IBM would license OS X and build some Power PC laptops... sigh.
.technomancer
I've had just about the exact opposite experience... Well, except for Dell. Their laptops are just awful for the price. We had one die recently and it took about two days of us trying to repair it followed by two tech visits and mailing it back to the manufacturer for it to start working again. Meanwhile we loaned the guy who it belonged to one of our presentation Thinkpads... He's repeatedly begged to keep the Thinkpad instead of his Latitude.
In our case, we can't kill the Thinkpads in service with us. They're solid sturdy functional little machines. They're also fast, as well.
Toshiba I probably haven't given a fair shake, as the police department got a bunch of refurb Toshibas and they were some of the worst trash I've ever dealt with. I saw in another post you said the Thinkpads you had problems with were used mainly by professors... What sort of problems did you experience? I begin to wonder if it was PEBKAC...
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
This should have been modded down as a troll. Or maybe even spam. "I dropped it and it broke?" That's interesting. Come on.
Small Laptops ...
I've been wanting a really small laptop for sometime now and finding one that looks sexy and has some punch at a reasonable price is not that easy. But when you realise that you can purchase a G4 12in ibook for just over a grand and an 11in G4 powerbook for just over 1.5 grand. This sony laptop starts to look decidedly expensive all for a couple of millimeters here and there.
Aside from the math, Id rather give Apple some of my hard earned dosh , than redmond. I'd bet Yellow Dog Linux would run a beauty on those *book's too. I just need a job... After a while one needs a gadget buying fix, and I've been yearning for the tiny powerbook for too long now!
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Yes, I was about to say that sooner or later laptops will be so light that people will be afraid to use them outdoors lest they be blown away in the wind. Soon we will be needing laptop-weights just to hold them down.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
Actually non-integrated WiFi is lame on all notebooks, but especially so on this one.
When it's ultra-light and ultra-thin, the goal is portability, right? This should mean I can close the machine, dump it into its bag, and run.
But you can't do that safely if you have a WiFI card in the slot with the antenna lump sticking out of the side, just waiting to break off or transfer a bump from the outside into the card socket (munging it and in all likelyhood your machine's motherboard).
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
After having my own Sony woes with my Clie and a friend's Vaio, I went on a search for the perfect (for me of course) sub-notebook.
My search ended at the Fujitsu P-5010. It's the size of a book so it fits in my backpack easily. It's not thin, but at 3.4 lbs it's light. It's 1" thickness prevents it from being fragile (with it in my bag, I've fallen on my bag...no damage). Plus the modular bay battery allows me to use it for about 7 hours of compiling Gentoo before I have to plug it in.
Linux support is good (except for wide-angle resolution, gotta go XiG for that).
My only complaints are: XFree can't do 1280x768 on the i855gm chipset (this may be fixed soon). I like a trackpoint more than a touchpad.
Check out the P-series forums at leog.net
No, as long as it's useful, a laptop can never be too thin or too small. Or too battery-conservinge.
Obviously you don't have to fly regularly with a computer. There are **THOUSANDS** of us who do. 5 to 7 pounds is a nasty backache waiting to happen, especially when compared to something like the Sony Z1A I have. It's got everything (2 USB ports, firewire, sound in and out, PCMCIA, built-in RJ45 Ethernet and 802.11b), sacrifices no drives (built-in CDRW/DVD, USB floppy), great keyboard, great screen, touchpad, it's speedy as hell, and it only cost like $2200.
Oh yeah, and it ways 4 1/2 pounds and is less than 1 inch thick. And has *awesome* battery life (6 1/2 hour regular battery, 8 hour "long-life" accessory battery).
wow, I think that's just too thin. I love my g3 12" ibook, and I think it's just the right size for everyday use. I know some execs will buy these sony's, but I suspect it'll end up on IT's desk more often than not. we had an issue at an old job of ours, the 'hot-headed' CEO would "drop" his tiny laptop (across the room) and it would break. again, it was sent in for repair more than it was used.
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
I hve nver nticd tat. As a mttr of fct I am tping tis mssge on a Sny rght nw! No poblm. (ad I tpe qite fst!)