Laptop Notebook

Sony Corporation has officially announced their entry into the Netbook market. The company will launch their first Sony Vaio W netbook in August 2009.

Sony Vaio W netbook photo, pretty in pink!

For the last two years, while the Netbook segment became extremely popular, Sony had expressed their skepticism. “Netbooks were ‘race to the bottom,’” they had said - so industry observers are a bit confused about exactly what Sony thinks about netbooks now!

Photo: Sony Vaio W - netbook or notebook?

Sony Vaio W netbook will feature a 10 inch screen with a resolution of 1,366 by 768 pixels. It will come with Microsoft Windows XP operating system running on a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N280 processor and 1 GB RAM. The dimensions are 27 cm by 18cm by 2.7cm. It also has a built in camera and memory card reader too. Looking at the photos of the Sony Vaio W netbook here, you can easily make out that this is a good looker - definitely better looking than most of the netbook computers out there.

We should make one thing clear, though. Sony officially does not call the Vaio W a netbook - rather, the official designation for the little laptop is ’small Notebook PC’.

The Sony Vaio W will hit the markets in France, U.K, Germany, Russia, Italy and Spain in August 2009, whereas the North American launch details are not yet revealed.

What is known, however, is that in the United States, the Sony Vaio W netbook will have a price tag of around $629. That puts the Vaio W somewhere between Netbook and Notebook computer territory.

The Netbook concept was first introduced in 2007 by Taiwan’s Asustek after which followed Acer Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell Inc with their versions of the Netbook.

Netbooks are really nothing but notebook computers with a small form factor, running Linux or Windows XP OS usually, and rely heavily on the internet and web-based applications. Their processors are not as powerful as the ones in popular laptops. However, they are often more energy efficient than laptop processors, and offer 4 hours to 7 hours of usage on a single charge. While they are perfectly capable of a great internet surfing experience, they are not equipped for heavy-duty applications such as games.