Hands on the Sony Vaio X
We get our mitts on the World's lightest, most expensive... er... netbook
Open the machine and you can push the screen back past the point at which its lower edge will lift up the back of the computer. No problem - just flip down to the two fold-away legs Sony has included. It hasn't done so for ergonomic reasons. No, the legs are needed to stop the X tilting backwards when the regular, four-cell battery is removed and replaced with the eight-cell extended-run optional model.
Inside, some compact motherboard design
Like other netbooks - which is what, really, the X series is - the new Sony has no optical drive. It does have a decent (lozenge-style) keyboard, which a lot of netbooks lack, and a carbon-fibre shell. If nothing else, the X looks the part, coming across as a serious, business-oriented machine and not a cheap toy for the kids. Well, apart from the 'exclusive' gold-painted version that is...
Even the SSD is pared down
How productive the businessman or woman will be is another matter. The 11in screen has a 1366 x 768 display, and a bright, glossy sharp-as-a-knife job it is too. But it's hard to imagine someone enjoying staring at it all day. So this is businessperson as in executive who needs to look up a webpage or data file occasionally, rather than worker who needs to get things done.
These folk will need the larger screens of the MacBook Air, Lenovo ThinkPad X300 or Toshiba Portégé R600 if they must also have a notebook that's very portable. All these machines are rather more powerful than the Sony too.
Thin is in. Light is might.
But not as mobile. Quite apart from its comfortable-to-carry around lightness and size, the X has built-in HSDPA 3G networking, so there's no reason not to be as connected as Captains of Industry want to be. And they can afford not to give a fig for the asking price. ®
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