Laptop Review: Sony Vaio P

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Only Sony could make it tempting to spend $1,500 on a PC with little more power than a $400 netbook. The Vaio P "lifestyle PC" starts at $900 with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor and 128GB solid-state drive in lieu of a hard disk; the deluxe version tested here (model VPCP118KX) is one and a half grand with a slightly faster 2.0GHz Atom Z550 CPU, roomier 256GB SSD, and Verizon mobile broadband with GPS built in.

To be sure, its 2GB of memory is twice that of your average netbook, and its Windows 7 Home Premium (32-bit) OS is more capable than netbooks' Win 7 Starter. But the Vaio P's performance, while perfectly adequate for productivity apps, trails that of comparably priced ultraportables by a wide margin.

But believe us, no one who sees the Vaio P asks, "How fast is it?" Instead, they exclaim, "How cool is that?", ooh-ing and ahh-ing over a notebook that fits into a jacket pocket like an oversized checkbook or cigarette case. The Vaio measures a sleek 4.7 by 9.6 by 0.8 inches and weighs 1.3 pounds, a fraction longer and heavier but thinner than the diminutive Fujitsu Lifebook UH900 we tested in May.

The Sony's screen crams 1,600 by 768-pixel resolution into 8 diagonal inches. It's bright, sharp, and colorful, but text in menus and dialog boxes is inescapably small and hard to read. A handy button on the system's front edge, however, toggles between full resolution and 1,280 by 600, which makes for more vertical scrolling but makes icons bigger and text more legible.

Another special button launches your Web browser when Windows is running or, when the system is shut off, loads a stripped-down browser environment that can get you onto the Web in about 30 seconds, compared to about 50 to boot Windows. A third button, labeled Assist, loads several screens of system care and troubleshooting tips or emergency restore functions.

The keyboard's A through apostrophe keys span 7 inches, compared to 8 for a desktop or full-sized laptop keyboard. That makes for cramped typing, but it makes typing possible in a way the 6.1-inch span of the Fujitsu keyboard doesn't. We found ourselves touch typing on the Sony with fair success, albeit with only moderate speed.

With no palm rest, there's no room for a touchpad below the keyboard, so Sony provides a pointing stick or nub embedded at the intersection of the G, H and B keys and two skinny mouse buttons below the space bar. The stick and buttons work well; you can also tap the stick itself for a left click, but it occasionally takes two taps.

We specified "no room for a touchpad below the keyboard" because, rather weirdly, there's one beside the screen -- a tiny touchpad at bottom right of the screen bezel, with two tiny buttons at bottom left. The idea is that you grip the computer in both hands by the bezel, with your thumbs operating the touchpad and buttons and the keyboard dangling awkwardly below.

Useless for most applications, this arrangement is doable for Web surfing but never felt natural or comfortable to us. More useful than the half-inch-square touchpad is the Vaio's onboard accelerometer, which senses when you're holding the unit vertically like a book and switches the display from landscape to portrait mode.

We browsed for some time with the screen on the left and the pointing stick under our thumb on the right, practicing the perk of tilting the unit left and right to move back and forward in Internet Explorer, but ultimately returned to ordinary laptop mode for most of our time with the system.

The Standard Ports Cost $60

Both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless are built in, as is a VGA webcam. SD and Memory Stick Duo/Magic Gate flash-card slots are located on the Sony's front edge. There's one USB 2.0 port on each side of the notebook, along with a headphone jack and wireless on/off switch on the left and a proprietary connector on the right. The last is for a dongle that adds VGA and Ethernet ports to the system; it should be standard, but it's a $60 option.

The 2.0GHz Atom processor and Intel GMA 500 integrated graphics are faster than ... well, most netbooks' 1.6GHz Atom processors and GMA 500 graphics, but not by much. The Vaio posted PCMark Vantage and Geekbench 2.1 scores of 1,767 and 955, respectively; it rendered Cinebench R10's sample scene in just under 15 minutes, compared to 17 or 18 for the average netbook. The Toshiba SSD helped the system feel sprightly when launching and switching among applications, but no one's going to use the Vaio P for video editing, gaming, or other demanding tasks.

No one's going to use it for too long away from an AC outlet, either, which is our biggest disappointment with the forget-it's-in-your-briefcase flyweight: Our real-world work sessions ranged from two and a half to three hours. Its low profile makes it the ideal laptop for when the airline passenger in front of you reclines his seat into your lap, but it's not up for a transcontinental trip.

Though our early production unit wore a handsome white case, the $1,500 WWAN configuration is currently listed on Sony's site only in black. The $900 model is available in black, white, or a vivid (OK, garish) pink, green or orange. Whatever the color, the Vaio P comes with trial versions of Norton Internet Security and Microsoft Office 2010, along with the Evernote note-taking utility and ArcSoft webcam utilities and a pair of noise-canceling headphones (really ear buds).

The Vaio P is an engineering tour de force. Both its screen and its keyboard flirt with, but just miss, being too small, making it the smallest usable PC we've seen and making other netbooks look like bruisers. As a way to turn heads while getting work done, it has few peers.

Against that, it's shockingly expensive and has a short-lived battery. Can we recommend it? Only for status seekers. Are we jealous of the status seekers? Absolutely.

Check out our 5 Shots set of closeups of Vaio P features.