Sony U750P Handtop

captainJam writes "In September we announced that Sony's U50/U70 line was being dropped. With news today that a North American version of this handtop is coming out, that news becomes half-truth. The U50/U70 may be no more, but the line has been upgraded a touch and simplified by having just one model instead of two. Handtops.com has a brief look at the new Sony U750P."

Comments

What's the niche?

[Kiyooka]

Wouldn't it be better to buy a laptop for that price? Then you could play DVD movies and do a lot more other things too.

Then again, with this you can bring all your work AND media with you. Plug it in at work, detach it, listen to mp3s on the subway ride home, plug it in at home...

Nah, I'd still rather have a laptop!

Anyone owns smth similar?

[ceeam]

Question for owners: what these devices are good at? I mean, at $2000+ it should offer smth that $300 PDA or $450 Smartphone don't. Please - it's not a flamebait, I'm genuinely curious. :)

Re:Anyone owns smth similar?

[CountBrass]

Simple: it's a general purpose PC, not a PDA or a Smartphone; nor is it an mp3 or movie player: although it *can* do everything those devices can do (except make calls).

Sure there's some crossover (the closest was the Zarus but not really). The Sony has the hardware you'd expect in a "proper" PC eg a hard disk and a lot of memory (no PDA or Smartphone I know of comes with half a gig of main memory).

So it's aimed at people who want to do more than you can do on a PDA/Smartphone but want something smaller than a laptop.

The reason the price is so high is a) the market is small and b) miniturisation costs money.

being tiny and inciting lust in other geeks

[RMH101]

that's the point: they're tiny, they look cool, and you want one. much like a mont blanc fountain pen or an omega seamaster watch compared to a biro or a cheap digital watch: they don't do anything different - they're just nicer - and some people are prepared to pay for this.
personally i could have bought a hundred cheap watches for the price of my omega, but i keep telling myself that the amortised cost per glance at the time is quite reasonable!

Just a reminder folks

[Anonymous Coward]

Captain Jam

Another one of /.'s favorite advertisers. Now we have another story plugging his crappie little site.

News for Nerds? Shills that matter.


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[Graymalkin]

I'm at a loss to understand the appeal of these. I can see the appeal of a handheld computer system with a large screen and I grasp the desire to have a lot of storage space on such a handheld. What I don't get is why a PC with its general purpose nature is being shoehorned into such an inappropriate form factor. It seems to me a device truly meant to be a haldheld and not cimply a tiny PC would be an overall better design.

I can see very few instances where something running a StrongARM/XScale chip with 64-128MB of RAM isn't going to be powerful enough to handle chores that would end up relegated to a handheld device. Current PocketPC and Palms can play video, compressed audio, and even 3D games. This is on top of all of the mundane uses like note taking, calendar keeping, and contact management they might be used for.

Running typical desktop software on a handheld device doesn't seem very appealing to me either. Running a full version of Word on a handheld while riding on the train sounds a bit ridiculous to me. A Word document viewer on a lightweight device makes a bit of sense but not the full application. I don't see many people with an overwhelming desire to run Outlook XP on their handhelds.

Then there's the price tag of these suckers. The U750 costs more than most high-powered laptops and quite a bit more than even extremely powerful and feature filled PocketPC and Palm handhelds.

I want a keyboard

[Jack Porter]

I've got a U101 and it's a great carry-everywhere notebook. I can do all the emailing, websurfing and occasional sshing that I need.

But why on earth would anyone want one without a keyboard? I've tried surfing the web with tablet and there's nothing worse than trying to type a URL with a stylus.

This thing is just a really expensive media player - I can't see any other use for it.

Looks like

[SomeOtherGuy]

Another example of taking all the shortcomings of a handheld device and mixing them with the shortcomings of a laptop.

In the real world I can't use this thing (or anything similar) in the field until I can make it through an 8 hour day of moderate to heavy use (outside away from power) without the battery going dead on me. And guess what, add the "wonders" of wireless network connectivity and GPS (2 important things for us people that have a userbase that works outside) -- and the 2 hour battery life will be at at about 60 to 75 Minutes. (I know to some of you that would constitute a full work day....but it is still not good enough for me)