A brief hands on with the Sony VAIO W

Apologize for not being able to bring you an in-depth article about the Sony VAIO W. I actually just checked it out for a few minutes when I saw it in Best Buy. I was pretty impressed with the netbook section at this particular store. There was the Sony VAIO W, the Asus Eee 1005HA, and the HP Mini 1000, among others. Up until then I hadn’t seen much of the VAIO W so I spent a bit playing around with it.

The first thing that I checked out was the chiclet style keyboard which very easy to type on, a la Sony VAIO P. Unfortunately it had one of the most bothersome of keyboard characteristics: the tiny right shift key.

If anything sets the Sony VAIO W apart from most of the netbook crowd, it’s 1366×768 resolution on the display which noticeably increased screen real estate from the other 1024×600 equipped netbooks adjacent the VAIO W. Unless you have bad eye-sight, this is a good thing. Even the completely default IE 8 screen, which seems to thrive on toolbars, seemed spacious at that resolution. It’s surprising to consider that the Sony VAIO W’s screen has more pixels than my 12.1 inch primary laptop which has a resolution of 1280×800.

I’ve always known why companies like Apple and Sony didn’t/don’t want to jump into the netbook game. They make products that are elegant and functional. Unfortunately, good design doesn’t come cheap, but as most of us know, netbooks do. So what do you get when you strip the design budget from the price of a Sony computer? Something that is decidedly less Sony, and instead more… regular. The unit was small, light, and pretty thin, but it just didn’t look or feel like the quality build that usually comes with Sony branding. At very least, someone at Sony said “We CAN’T put Vista on this thing, or it will suck. inch And thus, the Sony VAIO W is (I think) the only VAIO released to come with XP instead of Vista since shortly after Vista launched (this is a good thing).

Aside from these things, the Sony VAIO W may as well have been the same computer as the one sitting next to it, with its Atom CPU, 1GB of RAM, and same old ports as every other netbook seems to have. I can’t say I was particularly impressed with the Sony VAIO W, at least not more so than any other netbook I’ve used. They haven’t raised the bar, they just reached it.