Sony will bring its Flash-based Vaio UX ultra-mobile PC (UMPC) out of Japan next month when it ships the VGN-UX1XN micro PC in the UK. It may be small, but this handheld wireless computer comes at a hefty price: it will retail for a whopping £2,000.

But boy does it look smart. Unlike the current UX, the new model comes entirely in black and sports a blue-backlit black QWERTY keyboard. Internally, the star of the show is the 32GB NAND Flash-based solid-state drive, backed by a 1.33GHz ultra-low voltage Intel Core Solo U1500 processor and 1GB of 400MHz DDR 2 SDRAM.

The UX1XN's display is a 4.5in, 1,204 x 600 X-Black touchscreen powered by the Intel GMA950 graphics core integrated into the machines 945GMS chipset. It's Vista-ready, said Sony, but not up to Vista Premium spec.

The 0.5kg UMPC has 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a GSM/GRPS/EDGE cellular modem on board. There's a VGA (300,000-pixel) camera on the front and a rear-mounted 1.3 megapixel camera. The device has a fingerprint reader for extra data security.

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