Sony refreshes Vaio series with glowing body and dual batteries
Bright ideas?
Sony has refreshed its notebook range, with a colourful collection of glowing models and lightweight dual-battery options.
The new Vaio C series features a translucent lid that gathers natural light and reflects it throughout the body, creating a fluorescent glow effect. The notebooks include a 14in LED-backlit display, a 3D supported HDMI output, USB 3.0 port and a built-in HD webcam.
These eye-catching models come with a Core i5 processor, 4GB memory and a 320GB HD.
The latest Vaio S Series makes its debut and comes with a unique dual battery concept: an internal Li-Polymer battery with a rated life of seven hours, as well as a super-thin, extended battery that can be charged and added separately without removing the internal pack. The second battery can boost life by another 7 hours.
The Sony Vaio S Series comes with a 13.3in display, a Core i7 processor and 8GB memory. It also boasts built in 3G WWAN and switchable graphics cards.
Additionally, both models include a straight-to-web button, which starts the computer up in seconds without the need for a full boot up.
The Sony Vaio C series is on pre-order for £750, while the S Series starts at £900. Both are available from March. ®
COMMENTS
Product Development Meeting...
"To reduce cost further we made the plastic thinner, so thin that the light shines through it"
"oooh, that's a feature... "
Ewww,
Why the cheap feel?
Pity these look (and will almost certainly feel) cheap and plasticky, like practically every other laptop on the market.
I'm certainly no fan of Apple but I couldn't find anything at all comparable in quality feel to the 13" Macbook Pro when I was looking earlier this month.
You can certainly get much better specs for much less cash (it's definitely not worth the full £1020) but overall the solid quality feel and the superb trackpad are unmatched as far as I can see and it's easily powerful enough for what it was purchased for.
About time Sony et al got their act together and started building some solid feeling and classy looking machines instead of charging premium prices for things that feel like they came free with cereal...
@James Hughes 1
The Thinkpad T20s had that feature 10 years ago - a hot swappable "snazzy name"-bay that could be used for CD drive (this was before DVDs came along), a spare battery, and possibly as extended storage to expand the 10GB drive it came with, but my memory might be playing tricks on my aged mind.
I think what Sony are offering are the option to have a spare battery on top of the normal one, without having to lose some other functionality (such as the optical drive). I presume the USP is that unlike having to choose whether to go with the big longlife battery or small normal one before you boot up, you can change whilst the machine is running, without having to reboot (assuming you cannot just plug it in and then change batteries). Not much of a feature in my opinion...
Dual batteries?
Confused as to the novelty of this - my 3 year old Dell has one main battery and another that fits in the CD drive slot. What's new about this Sony one?
