Sony Vaio Performance Has a Price - The Review

The Vaio P is by far sexiest Netbook available, but the P is also the most expensive and could be your best friend or worst nightmare.

Sony came up with an impressive design for the P. Great material gives the P the feel of a real high-end subnotebook and has a far better conception than other available Netbooks. The P’s keyboard is a real wonder, soft, precise, and large enough to be used for hours… The P’s large screen is also impressive with its 1600 x 768 resolution, and wherever your finger goes or eyes look you won’t find any conception mistakes… The P is rock solid for its size and has been crafted with delicacy and precision. There are almost no drawbacks in its design, construction, and materials... Ok, I said almost, since the P’s tracking point is a little cumbersome, but except from that, we admire Sony’s design team for this awesome device.

While I have no doubt the Vaio P is a winner when it comes to design and construction… I'm puzzled with Sony’s decision when it comes to basic specs.

The Vaio P sold in Japan in your average store features the same basic specs as US and EUR versions. 2GB of RAM, an ATOM Z520 CPU at 1.33GHz, Intel GMA500 a 1.8” HDD at 4200rpm and Vista Home… The same one Sony Japan sent us to test for a few days.

On paper the above specs appear to be fairly common with any Netbook, reality is however a cruel thing… Let me put this simply, the Vaio P sucks… BIG TIME! At least the stock version.

From the moment you turn it on to the moment you see Vista’s desktop requires around 1.01 to 1.02 minutes… Hold on a second here, seeing Vista’s desktop doesn’t mean you can use it… Oh no, far from it! You'll wait at least another minute to surf the Web or even using basic functions (depending on your Vista installation) To make things wors I extrapolate that once you install Office, or any other software, and start using Vista’s Widget bar you'll have to add at least 15 to 20 seconds more before getting the full potential out of your P and the HDD LED stops flashing like crazy… I reckon you need around 3.20 minutes once booted up to use the thing and get everything from McAfee, Bluetooth, and Sony’s mouse software fully loaded.

For crying out loud it's 2009! How is it possible with a New Gen CPU with Hyper Threading and 2 GB of RAM than a PC be can this slow? I'm sure you've discovered the culprit… Yep, Vista has proven again to be a resource hog and was not designed to be installed on a slow low end PC… But Microsoft is not the only one to blamed here, Intel has their share of responsibility. The ATOM CPU sucks big time unless properly integrated like on the Ion platform (NVidia), and how dumb are Intel folks for not providing a similar experience, if NVidia did it how hard can it be… Sony’s engineers are also too blame with their poor choice of components. To give you an idea, whether or not you run Vista or 7… You'll never get Aero to work on the P, like we did on a far cheaper Sotec C1 Netbook… This mainly due to the GMA500 chipset the P uses … A low end integrated video chipset good enough to power an average PDA, but not a decent PC.

I'll be honest with you, I'm very disappointed here, I really wanted to love the P test unit we got, I mean just look at it! It's gorgeous, but how did Sony screw up their latest ultraportable so bad? We know that whatever ATOM CPUs plus the 945G Chipset can't play HD videos, technically impossible but at least it would have given us a better experience… far better than the ATOM and GMA500 combo…

Is the P total rubbish? No, not really, there's still hope but it looks like only Japanese consumers will get to test the real power of the P.

So far only sold in Japan or via other channels, the Vaio P90 is the only one to consider because of its 1.86GHz ATOM CPU and 128GB Intel SSD… You still can't use AERO or get smooth HD video playback, but you won't have to wait 2 minutes once booted-up to use it… Unfortunately the P90 comes at a price (around $1,800 US), four times more expensive than the Sotec C1 notebook we tested earlier that runs Photoshop CS3 and AREO pretty smoothly… Something that even a P90 may not be capable of doing. Sony Vaio P scores under Windows 7.