David Flynn09 January 2009, 1:00 PM
UPDATED: Sony slugs Aussie buyers of its purse-sized $2,300 netbook by dropping the inbuilt 3G and GPS, yet still charging hundreds more than the Sony US model that's got the lot!
When the netbook craze kicked into gear one short year ago, Sony took a potshot at Asus for driving down the cost of mobile computing and the industry’s precious profit margins.
“If (the Eee PC from) Asus starts to do well, we are all in trouble,” whined Mike Abary, senior vice president of marketing at Sony Electronics (US). It was all well and good for low-cost laptops to stay on the fringes of tech-savvy enthusiasts, “but if mainstream buyers buy it, then, whoa! That’s just a race to the bottom.”
But now we see Sony’s dazzling strategy to dive into the netbook market but stay out of the soup kitchen: charge your customers three as much as the competition!
It’s a cunning plan of which Baldrick would be proud. And lurking at its heart is the new Vaio P, which the well-heeled fashionistas will proclaim as more trendy than Fendi when it arrives here next month.
“We did something a little bit different with this product” says Abary today. “We thought about who this product would be for and targeted a customer before we conceived or designed this product. And that customer is fashion conscious, skews slightly more female and really is interested in how this product will make them look and feel rather than the speeds and feeds.” Well, as long as it doesn’t make them look and feel a few grand poorer, of course.
But give credit where it’s due: the Vaio P (it stands less for ‘portable’ than for ‘purse’) looks so sweet you could almost shrug your shoulders at the price.
With its unique widescreen form factor, the Vaio P looks less like a computer than a clutch purse
Sony has taken the tick-a-box tech of the netbook crowd and crammed it into a slim stylish slabette. The screen is a ‘superwide’ letterbox panel which measures 8 inches in the diagonal, but is wound up to a razor-sharp resolution of 1600 x 768 pixels.
The P’s overall footprint is 24cm long by 11cm deep and only 2cm thick. The wider form factor allowed Sony’s engineers to expand the keyboard so the keys are plenty large and there’s ample space between them. Forget about hunt’n’peck’backspace’n’correct – first reports salute the keyboard as highly usable.
While Vista is Sony’s OS of choice (no doubt because it’s shinier than
XP, and makes nicer sounds), the Vaio P offers a novel instant-on mode
which throws up the familiar Cross Media Bar interface from the
PlayStation 3 and Sony’s big-screen Bravia tellies. This lets you
quickly play music and video files or scroll through your latest
digital snaps.
The colours? But of course: crystal white, garnet red, olivine green and obsidian black
Inside is Intel’s Atom Z-series ‘Silverthorne’ processer, which has a smaller package and lower power drain compared to everyone’s favourite Atom N270. The entry-level models costing a mere $1,600 gets the 1.3GHz Z520 married to a 60GB hard drive. The premium bundle sports the 1.6GHz Z530 and a 64GB solid state drive for a whopping $2,300.
But what else do you get for your money? A lot less than anyone who buys the Vaio P in the US, where the top-level model comes complete with GPS, an inbuilt 3G HSDA modem and a 128GB SSD – yet still costs around US$1,500 (A$2,125). It seems that Sony has adopted another classic rule of fashion: that less really
is more.
Standard features on both the over-priced and over-over-priced editions are 2GB of RAM, a Web cam, memory card slot (which of course accepts Memory Sticks as well as SD wafers), 11n wireless and Bluetooth. Sony is claiming four hours on the standard three-cell battery, and double that for the optional six-cell module which may or may not be sold in Australia.