www.amazon.com See full Reviews Product Description With inviting textures and calming colors, the slim, travel-ready Sony VAIO NW laptop brings together stunning imagery, access to all your multimedia, and excellent productivity in an affordable package. This model (VGN-NW160J/S) has a fabric-like exterior in silver rattan that’s enhanced by a texture of gently undulating waves. But more than just a stylish accessory, the VAIO NW offers powerful computing resources with an Intel Core 2 Duo …
When Sony’s VAIO W netbook was released, we said the company would “have to do better than put a pretty face on a vanilla set of innards to get our next five Benjamins.” So what has the company done to raise the appeal of its little netbook? Boosted the processor? Added a big SSD? Lowered the price? Nah, it went ahead and painted some snowflakes on the lid. Pretty though they may be they still hide the same 10.1-inch, 1366 x 768 LCD, 1.6GHz Atom, and 1GB of RAM. There are some improvements: storage is upped a bit, a 250GB HDD instead of 160, and it now includes Windows 7 Starter instead of XP. And there are snowflakes. Still $499. Get yours before they melt!
Motorola’s DROID is just a few days away from dropping on Verizon, but why pay $299 (minus $100 rebate) for that when you could instead pay $299 (possibly also minus $100) for a fully-featured definitely non-netbookVAIO P? Yes, Sony’s littlest ultraportable looks to be coming to VZW, popping up on a test page in a configuration with 2GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, and Windows 7 Home Premium. Seemingly (and curiously) no SSD versions will be on offer, possibly to keep down on costs, as the subsidized $299 price is quite a bit lower than the $800 or more you’d be looking to buy one new — not to mention a good bit more appealing than the other netbooks Verizon currently has on offer for the same price. Mind you, that two year wireless broadband contract won’t pay for itself…
We’d have much rather gotten a VAIO X video promising us an upgrade to CULV internals over the Atom in the demo units, but instead we’re getting tinkling pianos and sword-based visual metaphors. At least there’s a hint of an “autumn” release date, we suppose. Full video after the break.
Google’s Chrome was already the default browser on the VAIO NW we handled a month ago, and now the Financial Times delivers confirmation of a wider distribution deal between the search giant and Sony. According to the report, new VAIO laptops and desktops will come with Chrome preinstalled — an “experimental” arrangement — and, most importantly, will default to Google for both their homepage and search queries. Pair this with the agreement to bring over a million Google Books to Sony’s e-readers, and you start to see some clear lines being drawn in the sand. Intriguingly, Google is said to be pursuing similar distribution pacts with other manufacturers, which would place Internet Explorer’s stranglehold on the uninitiated user under threat. Your move, Microsoft.
We’ve always loved the super-expensive VAIO TT with a passion, but apparently the netbook onslaught was just too much for the well-reviewed 11.1-inch machine to take: it’s gone from Sony’s US website, and we’re guessing that it’s not going to return. That’s too bad, since we’ve always felt the TT was one of the more beautiful laptops ever made, and while we could never justify its fully kitted-out $4,450 price tag, we always had one on our want list. Hopefully Sony has some grander plans for this size point than the sadly-generic VAIO W — in the meantime, light a candle and check our unboxing and hands-on gallery below.
Update: We just heard back from Sony — yep, the VAIO TT is gone, and it’s not coming back. Shed a tear, will ya?
Last summer, while Dell and HP were busy pinpointing and replacing faulty NVIDIA chips in their notebooks, Sony was adamant that its superior products were unaffected by the dreaded faulty GPU packaging. Well, after extensive support forum chatter about its laptops blanking out, distorting images and showing random characters, the Japanese company has finally relented and admitted that "a small percentage" of its Vaio range is indeed afflicted by the issue. That small percentage comes from the FZ, AR, C, LM and LT model lines, and Sony is offering to repair yours for free within four years of the purchase date, irrespective of warranty status. Kudos go to Sony for (eventually) addressing the problem, but if you're NVIDIA, don't you have to stop calling this a "small distraction" when it keeps tarnishing your reputation a full year after it emerged?
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