Sony Vaio P gets handled, verdict: hate it

When Howard Stringer showed off the Vaio P on stage at the Sony Keynote by pulling this laptop out of a suit jacket, I was curious. I stayed curious right up until I heard the price, then I wondered, who is going to love that? Turns out is not Brian Chen, over at Wired’s Gadget Lab.

So what are the problems?

Chen had problems with the premise: a small machine with small capabilities but priced twice of netbooks: niche of a niche if you ask me (but Sony and I are no longer speaking…). Sony has been very careful to stress it is not a netbook. You know netbooks right? Those things that are selling so well? This is not one of those.

Keyboard issues seem to be high on the list. A super small shift key plagued the machine as did its pointing device. This pointing stick seems to be a logical choice to avoid the space-gobbling trackpad, but in usage it seems to come up short. Chen calls it, “God-awful annoying.” The keyboard action didn’t please Chen either.

Slow. Sony packed a 1.33 GHz Atom processor instead of the netbook issue 1.66GHz. As a result, the machine lags behind others such as the MSI Wind on benchmark tests and it runs Vista, so overall, the feeling is one of sluggishness.

What does it have going for it?

The small form factor makes it attractive as does its gadgets: GPS, 3G connection, and Wi-Fi built in. The fit and finish on this screams high quality and it is just so good looking.

On paper, this wouldn’t seem like that bad of a machine. The temptation of netbooks at 1/2 the price of this machine ($900 starting price or $700 with Verizon contract) with some of the gadgets mentioned above and no bloated software give us pause. Do you call this a “serious netbook?” No matter what you call it, based on Chen’s hands on time we expect not many will call on it anyway.

Source: [Wired]