vaio w-12

Sony has finally decided to acknowledge the popularity of netbooks by introducing one… without actually admitting that it’s introducing one. The Sony Vaio W is a pretty standard looking netbook, with a 10.1 inch display, 1.66GHz Intel Atom N280 CPU, 1GB of RAM, 160GB hard drive and Windows XP. But Sony’s calling it an “internet book” rather than a netbook.

Whatever. It’s bigger than the Sony Vaio P, has a larger keyboard, a more manageable screen resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels, and will cost considerably less, with a starting price of $499 when it hits the US in August. You can call it whatever you want.

Aside from the higher than average (although not unheard of) display resolution, there aren’t too many things setting the Sony Vaio W apart from netbooks from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI, or Samsung. Sony does point out that the laptop is relatively eco-friendly and is Energy Start 5.0 compliant and EPEAT Gold registered. On the down side, the 3 cell battery is rated at just 3.5 hours, although an optional 6 cell version should be available as well.

It also comes with Vaio Media plus multimedia software that lets you stream media wirelessly over a home network to DLNA-enabled devices including a PC or Playstation3 console.

You can check out more press shots and a promo video after the break.

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14 replies on “Sony introduces a netbook, calls it an “internet book””

  1. DUH!!! ‘NET’ is interNET abbreviated.
    Sony “Internet Book” ????
    They so badly don’t want to admit that they were wrong about thier negative rants about Netbooks that they now put out one that is no diffrent from the rest. Oh yeah…I almost forgot, theirs is an “Internet Book”. Idiots.

  2. Hopefully the US keyboard layout is more usable.

    But c’mon – they didn’t keep the pointer from the Vaio P! Forget the touchpad, they are so small and nearly unusable on these things, I don’t see the point of keeping them…

  3. Note the space button – what was once called the space bar.
    Two and a half keys long now. At least we know where
    all of the excess plastic for the return key came from. 😉

  4. Yeah, but if you like your enter keys big and obnoxious this is your ride….

  5. Sony makes pretty good quality equipment, but they really don’t have a clue about how to make equipment people actually want. The shift key is a big deal, so is the price for a 3 cell battery unit. Sony obviously hasn’t learned anything from losing the portable music market (walkman brand) to Apple. They give the customer what they want to give them, not what the customers want to use. Sony, you get a grade of “F” for Fail!

  6. ARGH! Up arrow in front of a tiny right shift key!?! I thought we’d gotten past that…

  7. $499? Are they crazy? For $499, it better be running Ion and have a 12″ display – but it isn’t. Seems they need to drop the price about $100…

  8. One down, one? two? to go – –
    Still one or two “big names” out there claiming they will never
    produce one of these “dead end” product fads.

    1. It make the whole thing only a hair’s breadth smaller than my turn-of-the-millennium full-size Toshiba brick of a laptop.

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