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.