Never have I wanted a computer as much as the Sony VAIO P.
Never have I been so wrong.
Sony introduced the VAIO P at CES 2009, the height of the netbook boom, and its stunning design soared high above all competitors racing to the bottom. Look at your laptop; now imagine that the bottom half was nothing but the keyboard, and the top half was dominated by an ultrawide high-resolution screen. That’s the VAIO P. It is screamingly beautiful even today.
If I could wave a magic wand and bring just one dead form factor back to life, it would be the small, (almost-)pocket clamshell. I have a Psion Series 3, and its size, shape, and keyboard would, in a modern incarnation running, say, Android, be a great, much more capable alternative to a modern tablet. Sure, you can lug around an unwieldy external Bluetooth keyboard, but I’d much rather have an integrated, clamshell solution.
Too bad nobody else would buy it.
Thom you seem to have missed out a link. That’s just a quote with no context or link to anything to provide context.
Just to feed the impatient people me (like me). Here it is until Thom updates:
http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/30/13473970/sony-vaio-p-2016-review…
That girl has no Butt. Of course she can attempt to fit the Vaio in her back pocket.
Edited 2016-11-02 18:51 UTC
I have no butt either, but that Vaio is the same size as a newton message pad. I just tried it, no chance. At least not with a levis 501.
The article link appears missing.
Windows Vista is/was one of the worst operating systems ever released. It made any machine that could run XP brilliantly crawl to a halt. It could take five minutes to shut down for no apparant reason. It was painfully slow at release on even the highest spec available in 2006. It was hostile, complicated and naggy. The “protected media path” killed performance even when not using any media and at the time of the launch there existed no hardware at all that could play a blu-ray because there were few-to-none screens with HDCP and exactly zero graphics cards with HDCP.
And then manufacturers would put it on netbooks with Atoms and 1 GB of RAM.
The VAIO P was killed by Vista. It was an awesome hardware design and I am in the camp that really desires a competant ultra-mobile. The hardware is totally there now.
The Vaio P was also killed by the poor manufacturing quality. We had 4 of them at a previous job, and the hinges broke on all four, repaired under warranty and broke again.
We just gave up and sent them off for recycling. Typical Sony.
I quite liked Vista ran better and was way better looking than XP at the time. Windows 7 was just a SP for Vista IMO. Don’t get the hate Vista got it ran fast on anything made from 2003/2004 on with at least a Pentuim 4 or Amd Athlon XP, runs well with Intel Atoms in my experience. Heck I would take Vista over WIndows 8/8.1 any day.
Early on in the Netbook craze, I bought an HP Mini 2133. It was the base model, with a 1.0 GHz Via C7-M processor and SuSE Linux. Even at the time, which was pre-Atom, this thing was achingly slow compared to its contemporaries. The C7 and Chrome9 video processors haven’t aged well, to be sure, yet I can’t bear to part with the HP Mini because of its fantastic form factor. It’s not as compact as the VAIO P, but still unlike anything you’ll find today.
I love the keyboard, the high-resolution display, the touchpad (yes, even with the side buttons), and the overall size of the machine. It’s currently running Ubuntu 14.04 with the i3 window manager, and I use it mostly for terminal work, because that’s all it can handle, really. You don’t browse the modern Web with a 1 GHz Via C7-M.
Like the author of the Verge article, I would love to have something just like it but with modern hardware.
If you’re after something (vaguely) similar to the Series 3, Thom, the new GPD Win is the closest I’ve seen: http://www.gpd.hk/gpdwin.asp
I travel for work, so I carry a small laptop with me and for a few years that laptop was an eee-901 https://www.asus.com/Notebooks/Eee_PC_901/ This is one of the only 9″ netbooks (they very quickly went to a minimum 10″) and so it was very portable with pretty decent hardware and with the software stripped down as I do, it even ran well. It’s been great to me, but the never-ending bloat of the ‘Web has meant that the Atom processor just can’t handle a browser any more.
We’re going backwards, I swear.
The GPD WIN is vapourware for now. There are only CGI renders on that page. It is what I’m looking for, but I’ll wait for hands-on reviews; I doubt it’s nearly as powerful as their claiming and battery life isn’t going to be steller.
Nope, not vaporware. It’s in the process of shipping to its Indiegogo backers: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gpd-win-intel-z8700-win-10-os-gam… . And it’s been on limited sale from several sites for a few weeks (which has pissed those of us who backed the campaign to no end… they stated we’d get it first).
I had (actually still have) a Fujitsu u810. It was kinda useful, aside from jaw-droppingly bad design decisions around the keyboard (the arrow keys and Tab key had to be accessed by holding down a Fn key). It also had a noisy fan whose outlet blew it on your hand as you held the unit. But it runs OKish with Linux installed on it. Sadly, all of its non-standard hardware (such as the function buttons, screen rotation, and whatnot) aren’t supported on anything other XP.
That said, it was nice for commuting via bus, where you have limited space. Can’t wait to get my GPD Win for the same use.
Really? http://www.osnews.com/permalink?636478 <– looks like a real product to me, though it isn’t overly great.
Err, definately not vaporware. My GPD Win got delivered couple of days ago, and so far it seems to work pretty well
Feel like maybe putting up a review for the curious?
At a previous job we had HP Mini’s running Ubuntu as on-call/datacenter laptops. They were perfect for that task, but I admit it’s probably too small a market for HP to expend too much effort on it.
I always lusted over the p series from Fujitsu. I think the last gen was the p1630.
http://www.tabletpcreview.com/tabletreview/fujitsu-lifebook-p1630-r…
please no android crap
make it an updated series 5 with win 10 and a 1080p display
What, you mean running Symbian? Or EPOC?
But I would take a modern 5MX any time, agreed.
I agree i was going to post the same thing, i would take a 5MX as the keyboard was gorgeous for such a small device.
I dont think you could run EPOC on it anymore, im not sure what i would run, probably have to be Windows to take advantage of the keyboard however without a good pointing device and the screen being pretty small (thus making touch a bit haphazard) im not sure that would work either.
‘e’s not quite dead yet!
(Sorry. Couldn’t find a YouTube clip of that particular line from Monty Python.)
I’m waiting for the Pyra.
https://pyra-handheld.com/
I have the older 600MHz revision of their previous creation (the OpenPandora) and I’ve been very impressed with both the device and the community.
http://openpandora.org/
They’ve managed to do very impressive things with an 800×480 LCD and a 600MHz CPU with software overclock (mine’s stable up to 800MHz without overvolting).
They specifically chose an ARM chip where the 3D blob is both X11-compatible and purely userspace, so they’re still releasing updates, including for the kernel, long after Texas Instruments stopped supporting their chip.
Letting the analog sticks do double-duty as an analogue to a microjoystick mouse (left stick for motion, cardinal directions on the right stick for mouse buttons) is surprisingly comfortable and they intentionally chose a resistive touch screen for their superior precision and the ability to use your fingernail as a “no need to keep pulling it out and putting it back in” stylus.
…and the community has accomplished some pretty impressive things for the Pandora, such as:
1. An SDL port that gets quite a performance boost out of the chip’s hardware overlay scaling without the game seeing any ABI changes.
2. A libGL that translates OpenGL to OpenGL ES internally.
3. A Mupen64Plus port optimized enough to comfortably play a surprising number of my Retrode-dumped N64 games at 800MHz overclock, and manually-assisted static recompilation of certain especially fondly-remembered closed-source games like Albion and Starcraft to make them run as native ARM+SDL binaries.
In fact, the reason the Pyra will have four shoulder buttons (Ctrl, Alt, Shift, and X11-visible Fn for efficient non-game thumb-typing) rather than two like the Pandora is because one community member (Askarus) modded his Pandora and proved that it was a viable design.
Edited 2016-11-02 02:05 UTC
My Lord, the prices are too damn high : https://www.dragonbox.de/en/45-pyra
Sadly, that’s one of the downsides of making a product without big economies of scale and with atypical requirements like “must have X11-compatible drivers” that constrain the selection of suitable parts.
It’s already been discussed to hell and back on the forums.
My OpenPandora cost me about the same as the most entry-level Pyra back when I bought it years ago and I’ll still be saving for at least that on the Pyra.
Damn! That’s a pretty cool system. If they came out with a CPU board with a quad-core ARMv8 SoC, it would be an instant buy. Although a dual-core ARMv7 SoC should be good enough for terminals and SSH.
It’s on the watch list now. Thanks!
Even as a comic understatement, that’s a bit much.
You’d be surprised how un-crippled a well-tuned OS has made my single-core Pandora (the older 600MHz version that I can only overclock to 800MHz) with 512MiB of RAM.
Sure, Firefox struggles with JavaScript and I need to transcode videos bigger than 480p but, aside from that, the main thing limiting what I do with it tends to just be that some types of tasks really aren’t comfortable for me unless I’m sitting at a desk.
(eg. Even on a 15″+ laptop, I wouldn’t find OpenTTD comfortable with a microjoystick mouse, touchpad, or trackball and, regardless of the form factor, I need a quiet, isolated room to get into the right mindset for writing.)
Funny timing, I was just re-installing a fresh Windows 7 on mine. I’ve also replaced the mini pci wifi module with a crystal hd one for better video playback. If you are careful about what you run, it’s quite usable. It’s my travel laptop, so not a fulltime device. It really is quite stunning.
I actually have two of them: one hdd based model, and one ssd model. The former isnt particularly useful but the latter is still OK.
Edited 2016-11-02 04:49 UTC
I sure would! I’d be standing right behind you in line.
And, like the author of the article, I really, really wanted a Sony VAIO P. But the reviews were not positive, so I didn’t get one either.
But I would (will) spend money on one of those designs mentioned above in the comments if they become real.
Well, the Pyra is coming along very well and the progress reports and community involvement in the forums put the kickstarters I’ve backed to shame.
(I was actually the one who brought up the issues with baseband OSes, resulting in a decision to have the power controller drive the WWAN LED, just in case the baseband processor has the ability to ignore its enable/disable pin. It’s an internal pre-3.0 USB device, so DMA attacks shouldn’t be an issue, but the LED should help to mitigate the potential for tracking based on IMEI in SIM-less “emergency calls only” situations.)
Even if you decide not to buy it, the status updates on the ins and outs of designing and producing a niche hardware device are a ton of fun to read.
https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/forums/pyra-news.250/
Edited 2016-11-02 07:08 UTC
I had me one of those. T’was beautiful.
Clamshell-like Android netbooks do exists : http://www.hongkongeek.com/en/147-netbook-and-accessories
7″ with built-in wifi and bluetooth :
http://www.hongkongeek.com/en/netbook-and-accessories/8295-netbook-…
An updated version with a A80 processor and touch screen would be cool.
The Sharp IQ9000 was a competitor to the Psion and it was superior in many respects. A fantastic and much more hardy device (no more splitting cables) it never received the popularity it deserved in the UK. I did a comparison of the two devices for supporting Mars Confectionery’s chocolate manufacturing software and the IQ won hands down. We went for the Psion though as the machine was much more available in the UK with more software written for the thing.
While I have a weak spot for those ultramobile devices and actually own some historic stuff like the Atari Portfolio I don’t see how this form factor could still be useful today, even more capable as a modern tablet as Thom thinks. Either you have a really small device like the Psion 3 which only gives you a tiny keyboard which isn’t any better than using the virtual keyboards of tablets (or even big phones). Or you have a full sized keyboard like the Vaio P or the Psion Netbook or Apples eMate but your device will be about the same size like a modern ultrabook.
I’d rather buy a big phone and add a foldable keyboard. I used those long time ago with my pda and rather liked the combination, not unwieldy at all. Next step in size would be a small tablet with external keyboard or even clamshell like case with keyboard or a small notebook. But both again are about the same size and weight.
Edited 2016-11-02 12:38 UTC
One alternative would be a small device with a foldable keyboard (as in the IBM butterfly keyboards).
In fact, there is such a device, although is not a pocket computer; it is more like an instant-on dumb electronic typewriter:
KING JIM’s “Pomera DM10”
http://www.kingjim.co.jp/pomera/dm10/
Some reviewers say that it is somewhat thick, so it is not as pocketable as one would think. As a matter of fact, for the current version (DM100) they have changed the form-factor to one similar to the one of the VAIO-P.
That looks similar to what you get when you combine your smartphone with the Jorno folding bluetooth keyboard.
https://jornostore.com/
Once I’ve got some cash to spare, I want to pick one of those up to complement my travel mouse.
(Heck, once I’ve got a Pyra, its 1080p HDMI output support would allow me to have a desktop surrogate in any hotel room.)
post by mistake -now deleted
Edited 2016-11-02 13:07 UTC
And I’m just here sitting with my Nokia N950:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N950
I was waiting for someone to mention something from the Nokia tablet family!
Despite being a great smart phone, my Nokia N900 also felt very much like a very capable portable computer: an X server on top of a Linux kernel, GNU, SSH with X forwarding, true multitasking, a physical keyboard, all in a case that easily fit in my pocket.
I think there’s plenty of market for clamshell form factors, in the professional space. People who do actual work on there devices, vs. people who play games, and casually browse (tablets).
Chromebooks are the right idea, they just need all the convenience of the Play store – I think that’s what people like about portables more than the form factor. They are safe – don’t get viruses, it’s clear how to install and remove things, and they are generally fast enough for anything most users would want to do. Chromebooks with Android (and proper mouse/keyboard support) would be quite lovely. So would iOS in a small clamshell running on Apple’s ARM arch.
Just saw this review:
GPD WIN Review – Portable Handheld Windows PC –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C51mkucrnc
And thought – wow, this is a little like that think Thom was pining after.
Another review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6wa5yyEzeA
He’s attaching a full keyboard to it – I wonder why.
And the first reviewer is using it for gaming only.
Actually I don’t see either of them using the keyboard of the device. I’m not sure if this is really the device Thom is dreaming of – at least not in practice.
If he’d said “Psion Series 5”, I’d have agreed. But he said Series 3. The Series 3 had a chicklet keyboard. I used to use Psion hardware in a previous job, though they were industrial Psion Workabouts. They were a condensed Series 3 in a wand style configuration, which a similar chicklet keyboard. They were pretty durable, but they weren’t really great to use for typing on etc. The Series 3 had the advantage of a more spread out keyboard, but the software was very similar.
> If I could wave a magic wand and bring just one dead form factor back to life, it would be the small, (almost-)pocket clamshell. I have a Psion Series 3,
You aren’t alone! This was always my favorite form-factor and would even consider it on a smartphone (if, when closed, the back side of the panel had an e-ink display to deal with calls & music).
Previously owned (in no particular order): NEC MobilePro 780 (on the large size,yes), Sharp Wizard OZ-770, HP 200LX, Sharp Zaurus and the Psion Series 5mx. A couple of more lesser known brands – having a hard time remembering their names now.
I missed out on the Jornada 720 which I drooled over for the longest time. Even on ebay, years later, it was one of the most sought after devices and outside my price range re: price/functionality.
The parent article is off a bit in that it didn’t review the last generation of the Vaio-P (P11 series), nor the most powerful models released — the VGN-P799L and VPCP118KX. Being that the review is talking about the history of an entire product line it is unfortunate that it leaves out the most refined releases.
I have been a dedicated Vaio P fanatic since August of 2010 when I purchased mine, and and still use it regularly to this day. Articles like this make me sad because so many potential users who I think would love the P and the form factor get discouraged because of unfair or uniformed reviews. The VPCP118KX has a 2 GHz Atom Z550 and a 256 GB SSD and solved many (all?) of the performance concerns of the previous models. It runs Windows 8.1 and Slackware dual-boot for me and continues to be a workhorse.
My favorite thing about the P, beyond being dependable, portable and versatile is that it is still fun to use. The keyboard is peerless for its size, and being able to get work done or hack on a project anywhere anytime is addictive and liberating. As a platform it is always inspiring me, and has gone above and beyond anything I could have expected when I bought it. If you like the HPC form factor you owe it to yourself to give a Vaio P a chance and judge for yourself.
https://esupport.sony.com/US/p/model-home.pl?mdl=VPCP118KX