While Sony will tell you that the Vaio P mini-laptop isn’t a netbook because it’s smaller, features a higher resolution display and better build quality than most netbooks, the main thing that sets the Vaio P apart from your average netbook is the price. Sony USA sells the Vaio P with a starting price of $899.99. You can easily pick up 2 or 3 netbooks from Asus, Acer, Dell, HP, or MSI for that price.
But it looks like prices could be coming down. PC Home in Taiwan is charging the equivalent of about $692 for an entry level Vaio P with a 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z520 CPU, 2GB of RAM, and a 60GB hard drive.
That’s still a pretty high price for a mini-laptop. But at just 1.4 pounds, the Vaio P is smaller and lighter than most netbooks and it does feature a much higher resolution 1600 x 768 pixel display. And those features may be enough to convince some customers to pay a premium price — just not $900.
No word on if or when we’ll start to see similar price cuts in the US.
via Netbook News
Don’t worry about the price… Sony have enteres an alternative universe lately…
In Australia, you need to mortgage your house for one of these laptops!
Yes, the Aussie dollar did a nosedive a few months ago but now it’s back around US80 cents but Sony keep on pricing items here like the dollar is worth US50 cents.
They just launched the X series Walkman with the nice touch screen… the ipod model it competes with is half the price. When they say they have them in “limited availability” they mean “we dont need to carry them as no one is silly enough to buy them at this price”.
Don’t get me wrong, this netbook is a great little device and should be a slightly premium price with that screen but it isn’t worth what they are asking for it. How many do you see in the wild? None spotted here…
Somewhere along the line some Japanese people at Sony started thinking they were on the same level as Jaguar or Ferrari. Sorry Sony you don’t build hand-crafted products that number in the dozens, what you do is mass produce electronics that are very much dictated by the cost of other products on the open market.
The VAIO P isn’t/wasn’t ever worth $1000 or $800. It is not even worth $650 or $550 now. At best it is a $500 machine, and sadly as the price drops the buyers who might have been in the market for this drop to half price and think, “Well, I’ll just wait until it is being sold at TigerDirect for $339 because I see dropping like a stone.”