Sony should have a very, very good product up its sleeve or otherwise they risk getting slammed by the tech blogosphere for making a huge fuzz about its soon to be released subnotebook Vaio Pocket.
Now Jenn, admin at the Pocketables forums, managed to capture screengrabs from Sony Vaio’s Japanese site, which seem to be teaser shots of the keyboard of the device.
Nobody knows what the final product will look like and at what price it’s going to be available, but I am ready for a disappointment.
Knowing Sony Vaio’s I can already say that it will be expensive. However, it will likely be a beast of a netbook. The Vaio that I had before making a switch to my new Dell, so that I could run OS X on it, ran smooth and sweet… for almost 5 years. I had an issue with the logic board right at the end of my 3-year warranty (which only cost me $100 by the way) and they replaced the entire guts of the machine, extending the warranty another year and it is back running like a rock under the hands of my father now. For a machine that had a centrino processor and 512MB of RAM it still ran the Adobe CS3 Master suite just fine. I never once had any issues with it bogging down or being unusable.
I think the only disappointing thing that will come of this netbook is it’s price. I’m guessing it will be around $899. Here is my suggestion when it comes out. Wait 6 months. Buy it on their remanufactured site. You’ll save between 25 and 50% and it will still carry the same 3 year warranty that it would if you bought it brand new.
At least a.) it’s a netbook from a great computer maker, and b.) it’s not apple w/ some bullshit trendy tax. At least when I spend the money on a Vaio I feel like I am getting the full pricetag’s worth out of it.