Sony has unveiled a new range of Vaio laptops for business travellers that feature a slimline design and a low starting weight of just 655g, yet have a claimed battery life of up to 16 hours.
Available from November, the Vaio X Series is described by Sony as "a perfectly balanced package for style-aware business travellers", and comes with an 11.1in display based on the firm's X-black widescreen technology.
The models in the series are exceptionally light, and measure no more than 13.9mm in depth at any point across the chassis. Sony also highlights the styling of the new range, with gold, black and "premium carbon" finishes available.
At $2499, Sony are happy to call the VPCX117LG/B a notebook - and at this price. However, the usual netbook characteristics apply to the Vaio X: a small form factor (11.1in size), an incredibly light weight and the newest Atom chip from Intel.
Despite their light weight, each Vaio X Series is a full specification business laptop running Windows 7 Professional, 2GB of memory, a Flash solid state drive (SSD), a Vaio Everywair HSDPA modem as well as 802.11b/g/Draft n Wi-Fi support.
However, the quoted weight of 655g applies to a specific model fitted with an S battery, no integrated HSDPA modem and a 64GB SSD, available exclusively from Sony's web site. But even with a standard battery, the weight is still just 780g, about the same as Toshiba's ultra-light Portégé R600.
It's magazine-light form factor is actually a world record setting 13.9mm thin.
The models are based on Intel Atom Z550 and Z540 processors running at 2GHz and 1.86GHz respectively. These are single-core chips, so some performance is likely to be sacrificed to get such a light laptop.
Each Vaio X has a standard array of ports, including two USB, gigabit Ethernet and VGA ports, plus audio jack sockets and card slots for Memory Stick and SD card Flash storage. Bluetooth is also standard.
Two other X models; the VPCX113KG/B ($1,699) and the VPCX115LG/B ($1,899) will go on sale in Australia for significantly less, but will ship with more basic versions of Windows 7 as a result.
