allgeektout

At Sony’s CES booth, they had a lot to show off, including one of my favorites – the new Sony Vaio P Series. You’ve probably already heard of it, but in case you haven’t, the Vaio P is a new tiny “Lifestyle PC” (Sony is trying to avoid connecting it to Netbooks) that supposedly fits into a person’s pocket. I had the chance to try one out, and I’ve got to say, I’m pretty sold – on the concept.

Honestly, who wouldn’t be? A pocket-sized, full-power laptop? But despite what they say, it’s a netbook. And this isn’t anything against netbooks, which are fine computers. But at the Sony premium pricing (the entry model is $1000), you might as well get a fully-fledged netbook. It ran smoothly for the most part (which is quite a feat, considering it was Vista; I would love to see it run Windows 7), but even in my very brief hands on with it, I noticed multiple times where it lagged doing very simple tasks. I’ll be honest – despite the fact that many people did not like the XMB (modeled after the PS3 and PSP XMB), I thought it was kind of cool, although a little bit pointless.

I really, really like the Vaio P – it’s an incredible machine. But Sony seriously needs to consider a few revisions before they expect to actually break into the “Lifestyle PC” market.