Wow.
There's a review of Sony's X505 Centrino sub-notebook over at designtechnica. It's expensive $3.5k-$4k, but gawd is it pretty. It is:
- 2 lbs
- 1GHz Centrino, 512 megs of RAM
- Nickel carbon or carbon fiber construction
- 10/100 ethernet
- WiFi Card
- USB & Firewire
- mini-VGA out
- 4x AGP w/64 meg of VRAM
- 10.4" XGA screen
- Extremely quiet
- Excellent battery life
You have to give them some real credit on this one. I'm not saying I necessarily want one, but from an elegance, design and technical innovation POV you have to respect it.
IE, I don't respect Apple's 17" laptop. They basically took their current case, made it bigger and smacked on a 17" screen. Woo fricking hoo. It doesn't even use the space to its advantage... like oh, say, having a full size keyboard w/numeric keypad instead of the same keyboard used on the 12" & 15" laptops. About the only innovative thing Apple has done in the notebook arena for the last few years has been their uber-cool ambient-light sensing keyboards.
Even looking at the bottom end- I like the iBooks and 12" alum book, but they don't feel particularly well designed and integrated. The iBooks use 4 year old tech, and the 12" alums are either incredibly hot or, with the new battery update, cooler but extremely noisy because of the fan.
Your laptop should not be whirring like a banshee simply because you're listening to mp3s and browsing the web or watching a DVD. And I'm not just talking about the technical features, Sony seems to have really tried to make a real-deal package for those who need a notebook like this. Credit where credit is due.
Posted by drunkenbatmanJanuary 10, 2004, at 06:08 PM
