The good: Very small and lightweight; eye-catching design.The bad: Mediocre battery life; expensive; difficult to navigate.The bottom line: Sony's too-expensive, designer, ultramobile PC seems out of touch with today's more-affordable and usable smartphone, tablet, and Netbook offerings, with a package that doesn't best any of the competition.When we reviewed the first Vaio P in early 2009, we couldn't help but marvel at its minuscule size.
In 2010, however, the landscape is very different. In many ways we're at a juncture in mobile computing: smartphones continue to evolve larger screens and more-powerful software and processors; tablets are starting to emerge everywhere; and both of these devices call into question the point of the "ultramobile" PC. With all that in mind, we approach Sony's tiny new Vaio P--and its starting price of $899--with a skeptical eye.
The Vaio P has a very high-res screen and a decent keyboard for its size, but the oddly extrawide-screen layout, combined with the low-powered Atom Z550 processor and the positively frustrating trackpoint and side-mounted optical touch-pad controls (no, the Vaio P does not have a touch screen), leave this product lost in some parallel universe in which Android and iOS devices don't exist.
At $899 (and a whopping $1,499 for our configuration with a 256GB SSD drive), you could buy an iPad and an Android phone, or nearly three Netbooks, or a very nice high-end laptop and still have some spare change to apply toward an iPod Touch. The equation simply won't work for most, except for maybe technology collectors and fetishists.
The chief purposes of the Vaio P boil down to two features: the computer's full keyboard, and its capability to run a full Windows 7 environment. If it matters very much to you to have these two features in such a small form, the Vaio P could be a neat and very pricey toy. For others, an iPad or a far cheaper Netbook would be a better bet.
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