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A Raft Of New Products From Sony Japan
my1wong writes "Sony Japan has launched a DoVaio campaign which features a lot of new stuff. ... Main new stuff included wide screen notebooks ( E series), multimedia desktop replacement ( A Series), long-awaited evolution update to the ultra small U101, and this time it's a tablet indeed ( U series). Last but not least, the expected challenger to iPod, it's called VAIO pocket, VGF-AP1. All very sexy... Guess Sony has been woken up by Apple's success with iPods and Powerbooks."
God I love seeing shiny new gizmos coming out.
Not cos' I can afford them by any stretch of the imagination, but it means that the thing I've been wanting for the last 3 months is soon to be that much closer to my budget cos' it's becoming outdated...
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
Except for the proprietary ATRAC format killing of your poor MP3 world.
Ever notice that if you choose Sony, everything seems to work really well with if it is also from Sony? In their hardwary kind of way, they are getting as hegemonous as the big M.
The 20 GB Vaio is heavier and bigger than the 20 GB iPod.
Great advantage: battery power for 20 hours instead of iPods 8 hours
I'm all for competition and for things looking desirable. But I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed with the two products I checked out (the tablet and the iPod-competitor), especially considering that Sony have a pretty decent reputation for product design.
I own an Archos Jukebox from a couple of years back. It's not the most attractive device. More recently (when I was passing through Singapore and Hong Kong) I got to see and hold the new Archos devices and they are a vast improvement.
From Sony, with a substantial budget and existing stable of industrial designers, I expected a lot more. The buttons are an absolutely crucial component of a device's usability and appearance, and I don't think these two products really stand out. I have an iPod 40GB (thinking of selling it because I don't really need it; but the design and usability is excellent) and it's a very attractive object. I guess I expected Sony to challenge that a little more -- to provide more competition.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
When will some company take a decent processor and throw it into a tablet? I used a Fujitsu tablet the other week and loved it. It makes alot of sense to me to be able to flip the thing over and read like a book. Great for kicking back and reading datasheets. Now, if it just had some gusto- I could put a bunch of design tools on it.
It is all Japanese to me.
The real question is bang for your buck. One of the big things with the powerbooks is what you get for what you pay. You almost always come away with a better deal with a powerbook. The best I have seen is another laptop come even.
THe other big plus in the powerbook is a BSD based OS. Not windows so there isn't as much crap (virus, worms, etc) to deal with.
Evolution or ID?
I have a Vaio laptop (don't remember the number, but 700MHz PIII in the slimline case with external CD and floppy). It's a really nice machine, but when I went to replace the hard disk I discovered something: Sony tech support is useless. The only thing their hardware support page tells you is where to send the machine back. No service documentation available, and no spare parts.
Contrast this with IBM, where you can download PDFs with full disassembly instructions and parts lists. You can order parts from IBM for reasonable prices, and they show up in a couple of days. They're actually *helpful* on the phone -- I bought a refurbed Thinkpad that had a European keyboard, and they cheerully talked me through finding the US replacement.
Can't tell you if other vendors are as good as IBM, but I can tell you that if you plan to touch the hardware at all, avoid Sony like the plague.