Hands-on with the Sony VAIO P Series

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8in screen, 1600 x 768…

A laptop this size doesn’t have much room for a screen, but so wide is the P Series’ that its 8in display still has an unsightly strip of thick black bezel at either side. There’s no knocking its resolution, though – an incredible 1600 x 768. This is by far the highest of any laptop this size, but it’s not all good news.

The screen is crisp and bright (even at 50% brightness), but the high pixel density makes on-screen elements rather tiny. Even people with 20/20 vision will need to peer closely at times, although upping Vista’s dpi setting from 96dpi to 120dpi makes a big difference.

This extra-wide screen is great for displaying two windows side-by-side and the VAIO P Series even has a dedicated button that automatically tiles/untiles all open windows. This doesn’t do anything that a right-click on the Taskbar can’t, but it’s a handy shortcut.

Performance

Much has been made of the VAIO P Series’ specification, but there’s simply no way that Sony could equip a laptop this size with anything more than an Intel Atom processor. That said, the decision to pair an Atom Z520 chip with Windows Vista is an odd one and the P Series feels pretty pedestrian in use and it’ll be interesting to see how it fares with a streamlined Windows XP installation.

We carried out some informal timings and the P Series takes a full 5 minutes and 30 seconds to boot from cold – the Vista Desktop appears after a minute and a half, but it takes another four minutes before the hard disk stops being accessed. Hibernation takes around a minute; battery life is reckoned by Sony to be a so-so three hours, or five with a high-capacity battery.

Er, how much!?

And, of course, there’s the price. In the US, the VAIO P Series starts at $900, or a mere £617 at the current crappy exchange rate (£1/$1.46). But for reasons best known to itself, Sony has decided that UK buyers must stump up a whopping £849 for the same model – that's an exchange rate of almost one dollar to the pound. Nice one, Sony.

There will be three VAIO P Series models available, with prices starting from £849 inc VAT for the VAIO VGNP11Z/R. This has a 1.3GHZ Atom Z520 processor, 2Gb RAM and 60Gb hard disk, but no onboard 3G – that'll cost you another £120 for the otherwise-identical VGNP19WN (which also comes with a port replicator and a second high-capacity battery). The top-of-the-range VGNP19VN adds a 128Gb SSD and a 1.6GHz processor, but will set you back a £1,368.99. The full specifications of all three models are below.

There’s no getting away from the fact that the VAIO P Series is a stunning laptop and Sony really should be commended for coming up with such a dazzling display of mobile technology. Unfortunately, it should also kicked up the backside for its outrageous UK pricing. And the fact that Sony doesn't even have a backside just makes it even more outrageous. Grr. Here’s our hands-on video. 

[Sony VAIO P Series]

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