Presenting SONY’s new baby: VAIO P-series – comments on keyboard, screen and more

SONY said something big was coming on Jan 7, 2009 and they were right. Actually, it is not big but quite small and thin. The new SONY VAIO P-series is less than an inch thin and weighs just 0.63kg (1.4pounds). This means that it weighs same as the little Fujitsu U2010, but it has a bigger frame. It comes with a new, but slower Atom Z530 processor running at 1.33-GHz and it runs Windows Vista. It also comes with 2GB of RAM.

Presenting SONY's new baby: VAIO P-series - comments on keyboard, screen and more

It comes at insanely high resolution 8-inch screen running at 1600 x 768. I fail to understand how the consumers are going to use the screen for more than 5 minutes. 1600 x 768 is truly ultra-high for any person and it certainly won’t be much comfortable to use for sure. 1280 x 600 would have been the sweet spot. True, one can downscale to lower resolution, but then the screen won’t look clear as it should.

It has a big keyboard which the SONY claims to be just 3% smaller than the regular TT keyboard. This means that users will have no problems while typing long documents on the baby VAIO. But, do you see what we see? It has the same small shift key just like the EEE PCs. The only difference being is the placement of the shift key is now on the left of Up-Arrow key rather than on the right, which is seen on the EEEs. Also, the key with the letter ‘1’ is way bigger than the rest of the number keys. It comes with a trackpointer and does not have a trackpad to which most people are used to.

VAIO P-series - comments on keyboard

SONY promises that you will get upto 4 hours with the standard battery. The basic model starts at $899, which comes with a 80GB HDD. 64GB and 128GB SSD are also there, which would cost more. While the usage of the word ‘P’ has made many people to think if it points to the now defunct Psion, but SONY says ‘P’ means pocketable. How can you fit a 8-inch netbook notebook in a pocket? Even if you are able to do so, will you be able to walk comfortabley?