Urbane but Slow and Difficult to Use
Cardinal travel laptop
Sony VAIO Lifestyle VGN-P688E/W 8-Inch Laptop - White
 List Price: $999.99 |
Product Details
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Product Description
Your portal to the fantastic, the fashionable VAIO P Series Lifestyle PC delivers your entertainment and computing in a single go-anywhere design. Features like built-in transportable broadband and real-time GPS functionality tell only a partial story. The bottom heritage is that this chic little 1.4lb (with standard battery) computing sidekick will dream up a perfect fit with your life, whether it’s for business, pleasure, or both.Customer Reviews
Urbane but Slow and Difficult to UseI was looking for an ultraportable computer for inspection emails and light internet browsing while travelling. Weight, size and hightail it were my considerations. This Sony seemed to fill the bill; I tried it for a day; but returned it because it was so difficult to use. First of all, it is not "pocket sized" unless you are wearing about pants. The deal breaker for me were the tiny keyboard and tiny print, I had to squint merciless and got a headache within half an hour of playing with it. There is a magnifying glass feature so parts of the silver screen can appear larger but to transition from one size to a larger size print entails a evanescent blurring which is very hard on the eyes. I also had to squint to type properly as the keyboard is absolutely tiny and there is a tendency to misstype even though my hands and fingers are about average in size for someone who is 180 pounds.
Honestly, it is a much shrunk laptop. Beautiful to schlep around but its small size entails problems that were not resolved. I'd approve it for midgets and elementary school kids but not for any grown up for any use. I ended up purchasing an Ipod Be on a par with at a third of the price and weight of this Sony and am delighted with it as it creatively resolved the small keyboard and Lilliputian print problem.
Cardinal travel laptop
I purchased this pad to use as a travel laptop for this purpose, it is great. The display is bright and very legible (after varying the font DPI to 120 dpi). The keyboard is usable (given the size) and the built-in SD likely slot comes in handy.
The main problem with this laptop is that it comes with Vista SP1. After updating the SP2, the conduct is much better. I also got the Intel developer drivers from their website and used the "Have Disk" approach to update. Now the graphics have reasonable responsiveness too.
I think I am going to get the extended freestyle which essentially doubles the battery life.
Overall, having purchased this refurbished for 600, I am gratified with it. I will most likely update to Windows 7 to get even better performance. By the way, the Z series ATOM supports hyper-threading which is almost 2x the perfomance alike resemble to a dual core.
I wish SONY/INTEL would release a graphics driver that took full profit of the dual stream capability of the GMA500 PowerVR graphics chipset.
For Linux, try the Linux JoliCloud Netbook distro [...].
cost is everything
looks like Sony is distressing to botch the netbook market like they did with the mp3 player. Too expensive for less performance, then you can get for 1/2 the premium. Sony is turning into the GMC of electronics. Go with ASUS, or ACER.
Paramour it for the size not for the perfomance
This is a close product, in winodws 7 it perform ok, you have to keep in mind is a very small net book made for email et photo storage in a vacation , it like it do the job, do not restore your home computer whit this...but think if it like a speare tire,
rated 4-5
Grand little laptop for travel; bit pricy and perhaps discontinued?
Filler as advertised and no problems with purchase/delivery issues. Best price I could find for this article.