In the market for a netbook that all your friends will think is the Sony Vaio P — as long as they’ve never seen one in person? The Vaino, or COOLVAIO is a rather generic netbook with your typical mini-laptop specs (1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU, 1GB of RAM, and a 160GB HDD), but with a trademark lawsuit-inducing logo thrown in for good measure.
The netbook has a 10.2 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display and measures 9.8″ x 7.3″ x 1.2″ and weighs 2.9 pounds. That makes it quite a bit bulkier than the real Sony Vaio P. But it sells for the considerably lower price of $392.
via SlashGear and UMPC Fever
This is why not that many people drive kit cars. Nothing is worse than driving around in some fake Pontiac Fiero looking like a Ferrari and EVERYBODY knows it. And any true netbook fan who isn’t BLIND will immediately recognize you as a poser if you get one of these Vanio fakebooks. I would rather have a 100% real Eee than a fakebook any day.
The photos don’t seem to reflect 9.8″ x 7.3″ dimensions. They may have faked them to make it look narrow, as though it had a trackpoint instead of a touchpad 🙂
Edit: Saw one small picture on their site which showed it opened up, apparently with touchpad, but seeming to have the bigger dimensions, rather than the narrow look of the pictures with the unit closed.
it’s a pisstake on over-funded w*nkers who can actually afford a real sony one.
perhaps they should make a model that has the exact dimensions of the sony but when you open it up, there’s just a mirror to look at yourself 🙂
don’t get me wrong, i love sony products (usually) but the price of this is way out of whack compared to the competition. yes, they have pushed the envelope with screen res and built in GPS so you could (almost) justify the price of two bits of tech in one but it’s pretty hard to do so in the current economic situation. i look forward to seeing one in the flesh and lusting after it. will last until i realise there ain’t enough $$$ in the pockets to actually buy one.
maybe they won’t sell too many and they’ll clear the stock at more attractive prices…
living in hope 🙂
To me, the TrackPoint and lack of a touchpad is the most interesting feature of the Viao P. If it sells, maybe someone else will come out with a “real netbook” with this design. The availability of the TrackPoint may be the holdup.
IBM introduced the TrackPoint on their first ThinkPad in 1992 and presumably the Chinese corporation Lenovo took possession of it in 2005 when they bought out IBM’s Personal Computer Division and became the worlds third largest PC manufacturer.
My guess is that Sony is paying Lenovo for the TrackPoint technology and I’m very curious as to the cost per unit, if that’s the way it’s figured. I’ve seen replacement TrackPoint caps advertised for Dell, HP Compaq, Toshiba laptop computers and PSP (Playstation Portable), so I suspect these folks were able to afford paying Lenovo a licensing fee.