I've always been a fan of ultraportable computers, and I've owned a few, which include a Motion LS800 tablet, Raon Everun, Vaio TX, Vaio TZ, and an Asus 1000H. So, my review is based upon my experience with those machines. The Vaio P, in my opinion, is the ideal combination of portability and functionality, if typing is an integral part of your computing needs. I bought 2 of them (one for me, one for the wife) as soon as they were announced on the Sony website, and have been using it for about 2 weeks.PRO'S:
(1) SCREEN RESOLUTION: One issue that I have always had with any ultraportable (outside of the Vaio TX and TZ) has been low screen resolution (e.g. 1028 x 680), which has always lead to lots of scrolling and/or zooming-out. The resolution on the Vaio P is, in one word, incredible. EVERY webpage is viewable in its entirety on the screen, as is EVERY document I need to read or edit. The downside is that text ends up being VERY small on the screen, but still legible to me (I type documents in 10-pt Times New Roman font). However, there is a personalization option available that allows you to make text/icons 125% larger than normal, which makes things much easier to see. My wife wears glasses and has trouble reading the text at normal settings, so she uses that mode and it works well for her.
(2) PORTABILITY: Okay, let's not kid ourselves here. This thing will NOT fit in your shirt/pants pocket (unless you're wearing very baggy cargo pants), but it will fit in a purse or any small satchel. Weight is negligible, even with the extended-life battery attached. Portability is a big thing for me in my profession (medical student, MD in a few months), and this machine can easily fit in the pocket of my white coat when I'm on the move.
(3) THE KEYBOARD: I type extensively as part of my profession, and having a usable keyboard is a component that has always been missing from any computer that I could carry on my person. My Motion tablet and Everun were useful for reading on-the-go, but essentially useless for typing anything beyond a short phrase. My Vaio TX/TZ have great keyboards (I've typed thousands of pages on them), but the machines themselves are too large to carry on me at all times.
Let me also take this opportunity to point out that, in comparison to the Asus 1000H, the Vaio P is not just another crappy netbook. The keyboard on the 1000H, for many reasons, is a low-quality component that definitely shows with heavy use. Any typing mistakes made with the Vaio P are genuinely my own keystroke mistakes, which was not the case with the Asus (90% of the time, it was just the junky keyboard causing mistakes). The right-shift key on the Vaio P is truncated, but its placement to the left of the arrow keys makes it a much more natural motion to hit, and something that you can become accustomed to without causing you to alter your typing accuracy on a normal-sized keyboard, which was really just impossible with the 1000H (that had the right shift key placed to the right of the arrow keys).
(4) FUNCTIONALITY: It is a fully-functional PC, capable of running any program you might need to run, given that you're not trying to use this as a gaming PC. I have installed Windows 7 on my Vaio P, which has made it much more efficient at running multiple programs simultaneously, as well as improving stability. I would highly recommend this upgrade for anyone purchasing this machine.
CONS:
(1) VISTA: This machine should have come standard with XP. Vista boot time is horrendously slow, even from hibernation, and installing Windows 7 does not fix this problem. My other ultraportables running XP were able to return from hibernation in about 20-60 seconds. The Vaio P takes probably 2-3 minutes. Maybe I'm a little impatient, but I want my computer to be ON when I turn it on. The integrated instant-on technology is not terribly useful to me because I generally need to use programs other than Media player or Firefox when I fire my machine up.
(2) NOT USER-UPGRADEABLE: As I understand it, the RAM is soldered to the motherboard and thus not upgradeable. 3 GB of RAM would have made the VAIO P much faster, and would have alleviated problem (1) I described above, and with 3 GB of RAM, Windows 7 would not even be a necessity because it would then be able to run Vista acceptably.
(3) STANDARD BATTERY LIFE: Sony touts 4 hours of life with the standard battery, which is of course a lie. It's more like 2.5 to 3 hours with screen brightness turned down to 1 or 2 (at which it is still very much readable/viewable), with WiFi on. I also have the large capacity battery, which takes it to 6.5 to 7 hours at the same settings. The large capacity battery adds maybe 1 to 1.5 cm of height to the machine, which is something of an eyesore, but I will make the sacrifice because the added battery life is worth more to me than the 0.2 lbs (not noticeable) and increased size.
(4) LACK OF TOUCHPAD: This omission is well-documented in other reviews; the pointing stick does what it is intended to do and it does it well -however, it does NOT replace the touchpad or a mouse. Most people are already well-aware of this issue before purchasing the Vaio P. One thing I would liked to have seen instead is the optical mouse like on the Raon Everun, which is an intuitive and exceptional pointing device that is easier to use than the pointing stick.
*CONCLUSION: the Vaio P is an exceptional device of modern engineering that allows its owners to maintain productivity at a level comparable to that of a laptop while away from home, or when lugging a laptop case is impractical -thus, I must stress that it is intrinsically a COMPANION PC. One should not expect this to REPLACE a primary PC, nor should one anticipate using this as their laptop 100% of the time, 24/7, because it simply would be foolish and needlessly uncomfortable to do so. I would make the analogy of comparing WiFi to a T1 connection -given the choice and availability, no one would choose WiFi over a T1 connection, but the convenience and mobility of a WiFi connection are advantages that the T1 cannot match. In the same way, the Vaio P offers unmatched portability and convenience, but its purpose is of a different nature than the primary laptop/desktop -so, as long as you keep that difference in mind, the Vaio P should enhance your productivity and live up to its tag of being a "lifestyle" PC.
I travel a lot, nearly all of it internationally, and often in economy. This is a laptop that you can use on the smallest of tray tables, even with the seat in front of you fully reclined. I bought the leather pouch accessory and often carry the laptop around in it. It's great to just be able to walk by my desk, toss it in the pouch and go to a meeting and then pull it out if I need it. Since it is only about the size of a notepad, it's easy to carry around everywhere, to situations I wouldn't want the bother of a laptop bag.
The laptop appears sturdily built for the rigors of road warrior travel. Since February, I've flown more than 50K miles with it, including a 2 week vacation in Japan where we visited 11 cities. It's taken its fair share of bumps and doesn't show it. I originally bought this for my wife but began using it as my own when my company provided Dell E4200 broke in its 3rd week (the monitor backlighting electronics burned out). While the monitor lid is not thicker than other models, it seems to be more resilient because of the smaller surface area.
The Vaio P is visually attractive. When using it in the executive lounge in the airport or on a plane, people will often come up to ask what model it is. The screen quality is amazing, especially when you consider they packed 1600x768 pixels into that tiny screen. You'll need 20-20 vision or better to be able to comfortably read this screen, which will be a deal breaker for lot of people. If you're unsure, try one out in a store before buying. Setting the icons and text to a larger size can help. One of the things that I don't like about the laptop is that it does not have and lower resolutions that are in proportion. For example, the next lower resolutions are 1024x768 and 800x600 which appear distorted since they are out of proportion compared to the native resolution. There are times when I'm in a bumpy car or somewhere else with a lot of motion and use the 800x600, but it would be nice if they had something more proportional like 800x400 or 1024x500.
Love the keyboard and the pointer stick (I can't stand track pads). The right shift key is unusually sized and placed, it drove me nuts for about 2 weeks until I got used to it.
The power adaptor is small. There are no ports for Ethernet and VGA on the laptop, you need to plug in the included dongle for that. The dongle is fairly small and clips on to the power adaptor brick. The only thing I didn't like about the dongle is that it does not have little LEDs on the Ethernet port that show the status of the Ethernet connection. This is a useful features for travelers to know more quickly if the port you plugged into is live or not.
The laptop came with Verizon 3G, which has a nice prepaid option where you can buy service for $9.95 a day, without entering into a contract, which is nice compared to buying WiFi access in hotels, since you can use it anywhere you have coverage for the day. (I didn't find any coverage holes on my trips to southern California, Chicago, Northern Virginia, Baltimore and Miami) However, since most of my travel is outside the US, where the card does not seem to work, this is a mostly useless feature for me and it would have been nice to be able to trade it for something more useful like, GPS.
A few things I didn't like:
The main issue we had with the laptop was poor performance with Windows Vista. As installed, it is unacceptably slow for regular everyday use. We installed the beta of Windows 7 on the laptop and it is working fine. Installing Windows 7 on the laptop is a breeze, the only drivers I downloaded were for the video and the network. I have been running with this laptop as my main computer for the last few weeks (on Windows 7) and the performance is not an issue opening web pages, outlook, powerpoint, excel and word at the same time. Things will start to slow down with too many (e.g., 8 Firefox windows, outlook, 2 powerpoint presentations and 3 excel sheets) closing a few windows will bring back the zippiness. We didn't get the SSD and I wouldn't bother. I keep a fast 32GB SDHC card in the SD bay to increase the storage size since 64GB can be a little limiting.
The battery life is not great with WiFi on, I get less than 2 hours battery life. A little more than 2 hours with the WiFi off. The power adaptor outputs a non-standard voltage: 10.5V, so you will not be able to use it with nearly any universal power supply or universal laptop batteries (like the ADC). Together with the low battery life, this is a serious problem on trips.
A word to the wise, contrary to some misleading information on the Vaio website, this laptop does *not* come with GPS or any navigation software. I was very disappointed about this, as the website intro to this product implies they have it and the sales rep that sold me my laptop over the phone confirmed that the laptop definitely does come with GPS. To the best of my knowledge, none of the P-series laptops Sony is selling in North America come with GPS. We came very close to returning the laptop for this reason alone. Another thing to be wary about the sales rep tried to sell me an Ethernet/VGA dongle when the laptop already comes with one.
The WiFi card does not support 5GHz WiFi N this is disappointing in a brand new premium laptop since this has been available on many laptops since the middle of last year. Also, the laptop does not have an easily found serial number on the bottom. This may sound nitpicky, but it's a problem for those of us that visit buildings that require registering the laptops with a serial number before entering and upon leaving.
In summary, this may sound like a lot of things not to like for someone who loves the laptop, but I wanted to be complete as this laptop is not for everybody. I love the smaller size and that for such a small size it has such a nice keyboard, screen resolution and reasonable performance on Windows 7. More memory, a faster processer and a larger disk would be nice, but I can get by. The bigger problem is the battery life and I'll probably be getting an extended battery in the future to solve that. The Vaio P is also reasonably rugged my last 2 laptops were a Dell E4200 and a Sony TZ-200 both of which developed screen problems and needed repair on my first or second trip with them (and neither suffered any significant abuse). I'd give it 4 stars, but am docking Sony 1 star for being misleading about the GPS.I have used few other laptops and desktops. But this was my first try with "netbook." This products has a great features, style, and size and that's one of the reason I bought this netbook. There are some pros and cons about this and I'll let you know to help you on purchasing this item.
pros:
1. The Size: size of this product is just amazing. There are few other netbooks came out but this is the smallest. Very handy and portable. I mean who's gonna beat the size of 9.65" x 4.72" x 0.78" and the weight of 1lb 4.8oz? The only thing is, it's not going to fit on your hip pocket, like it advertised. But It will fit on your hand just fine, or for girls, it will fit on your small purse.
2. The resolution: Most of the netbooks came out with the screen resolution of 1028 x 680, but Sony made this 1600 x 768, which provides more comfortable views for users. Although, the 8 inch screen is kindda too small for that resolution, you might feel tired after looking at the screen for long time.
3. The instant booting system: The instant booting system (based on Linux system) takes about 15 seconds to boot up, you can browse websites, watch movies or listen to musics. You can also boot up the computer to windows mode from there. This comes very handy.
Cons:
1. Sony just had to make it with the Vista. The performance goes dramatically down running Vista on this product. You can also downgrade it to XP, which makes VAIO P much faster to perform, but you will find lags watching movies because there's no GMA 500 chip set driver for XP. The best way to use VAIO P is to upgrade its operating system to Windows 7, overall performance was very nice. Although, it might be slower than XP, you can use GMA 500 driver and overall performance is good.
2. VAIO P is using 1.33GHz Z520 Intel Atom Processor. This chip set makes VAIO P not able to perform as fast as other laptops, but for netbooks, it is pretty fast.
3. The price of this is about $1,000 when most of netbook's price is around $500. I don't think VAIO P performs twice as much as other netbooks, but the design of it is more than twice as much as other products.
4. HD (Hard Disk) performance is much lower than SSD (Solid State Disk) performance. I think it'd be much better to choose SSD model if you want to buy this. Bad about it is the capacity. It only holds 60GB for HD, and 64GB for SSD.
Overall, This is a netbook that I personally thought of best. I think this is definitely not for the main computer, but great for sub-computer. It comes very handy and portable, so if you are looking for a sub-computer (or laptop), this is one of the best.This is such a nicely made laptop. Awesome style, beautiful design..not a bad price considering Sony Vaio's past history. The text is going to be small and it's something you will have to deal with if you want the portability.You can increase the font size but I didn't like how it distorted some of the graphics. Keyboard is decent as well for the size. It does tend to run really hot so I doubt there is any cooling system in this tiny little package.The pointer mouse also takes some getting used to. My biggest gripe is how incredibly slow this thing is. I had the Vaio TX series before this one and it too was impossible to run on Vista. I agree this needs to be downgraded to XP. In my experience I have not had too many pc's that ran well on Vista anyway. As a matter of fact I just installed Windows 7 Ultimate on an Acer Aspire One and that seems to work better than Vista as well. I might try that first before I switch this to XP. I may end up returning this if it continues to be slow. My $300 Acer runs so much better out of the box than this one. Also, like the TX series I purchased before this, it comes with so much crap on it that it takes up 20gb+ of the 60gb hard drive.My model is US version
Good:
Small size and lightweight.
Lots of RAM.
Usable keyboard for the size.
Small power brick.
Great looking display.
Windows XP performance is great.
The external vga / network connector clips to the power brick when not being used.
Bad:
Installing XP is possible but needs a good amount of operation system and driver installation knowledge, and needs a bootable USB CD/DVD drive.
Only 2 USB ports.
VGA and wired network are on an external connector, which is ok when you take into account the size.
Screen resolution of 1600x600 is too small, try 800x600 or 1024x600.
Pointer stick instead of trackpad, not a problem in my opinion.
Ugly:
Vista, performance is pathetic. Install XP.
XP install of GPS and WAN support is in the early days.
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