Sony Releases New VAIO P Series 8-inch Screen Notebook

The VAIO P is about the thickness of a cellphone and Sony is claiming a weight of 1.8lbs, meaning it can comfortably fit into your coat pocket or easily slide inside a purse or backpack pocket.  The screen may be small at 8-inches, but the unbelievable 1600 x 768 resolution will mean a lot of viewing real estate can be crammed into that small area -- at the cost of very small text and icons of course.  The screen is a glossy XBRITE-ECO variety.

The VAIO P is crammed with wireless options, including Wi-Fi 802.11n, BlueTooth and Verizon WWAN (subscription required).  Location "GPS Like" functionality is part of the mix to enable you to quickly find local restaurants and points of interest.

The VAIO P comes with an Intel Atom Z processor clocked at 1.33GHz with 512KB Cache.  Built-in RAM is 2GB and the OS that comes bundled is Windows Vista.  Obviously performance will be a concern, and Sony has somewhat addressed this by offering an instant-on lite OS called Sony XRoss media bar that allows you to surf the web, play music and view media files without booting into Windows.

The VAIO P will start at $900 and be available in four colors: Onyx Black, Emerald Green, Garnet Red, Crystal White.  Interestingly Sony is not attaching the name "netbook" to the VAIO P.  While the size would suggest this device fits into the so called netbook category, the high-end price and other features do not.  This device is somewhat like the older Sony VAIO U series that has been around for a while.  As with the VAIO U, a dongle is needed to support monitor out and LAN ports.

We'll have a Sony VAIO P review unit in our hands soon and will be sharing more pictures and first thoughts at that time with of course a full review to follow in the coming few days.