Sony VAIO Lifestyle VGN-P688E/W 8-Inch Laptop – White

5 comments

1. 

   K. Suh on December 11, 2009 at 2:55 am

   When I first spotted this product in the Sony store, the only question that went through my mind over and over again was “…why…”.

   *BY THE WAY FOR THOSE THAT MISSED IT THE FIRST TIME, AND FOR NEWCOMERS, HERE’S MY EXPERIENCE WITH THE PRODUCT*

   First off, this is one amazingly well-engineered product. It’s solidly built, but still light and ultra portable. Despite the small screen, web pages and applications are displayed brilliantly – it was a great idea to make the screen wider than it is tall, like most widescreen desktop monitors. The battery life is impressive too, rated at about 6 hours with standard use. The keyboard is much easier to use than it looks, and the trackball is just as easy to use as a mouse pad.

   *DID YOU GET THAT? DO YOU WANT ME TO GO INTO DETAIL ABOUT A BUNCH OF INFORMATION THAT’S ALREADY ON THE PRODUCT’S PAGE?*

   Unfortunately, none of these features can withstand how incredibly asinine the price of this product is: A THOUSAND DOLLARS!!!!

   When I was a child, I thought a thousand dollars was an impossibly large amount of money. It was hard to imagine what I would do with that much money. Now I know: I can spend it on a netbook that’s actually inferior to every other netbook out there.

   To be fair, Intel and Microsoft have teamed up to make our lives miserable by severely restricting the specs of netbooks – in case you haven’t noticed already, almost all netbooks have extremely similar specs. Manufacturers must obey their guidelines, otherwise they are punished by being denied the latest and greatest processors. Hence, this netbook, which deviates from the norm, has a sub-standard processor when compared to the competition which cost hundreds less. You really can’t blame Sony for attempting to create a unique and successful product at the cost of performance which is really at the whim of the computer giants.

2. 

   Anonymous on December 11, 2009 at 5:23 am

   this laptop has troubles with wifi connection, i change it for a new one and it had the same issue. I contacted Sony Vaio customer service and they couldn’t resolve the problem.

3. 

   Breaking Sunrise on December 11, 2009 at 5:26 am

   I like size but would rather buy a small weight Vaio with a Blu Ray Disk player for my use so I could use DVD’s in the newest format and that would be worth the extra money. So until they can add that kind of entertainment it seems no better than having a I Touch actually better to have something like that than just a very small computer you can’t use for many things yet.
   
   No Thanks I would stick with Sony Vaio computers with lowest weight and be entertained and have it all!! OH Yeah! BS

4. 

   Jeff Chen on December 11, 2009 at 7:18 am

   I like Sony product overall, but this product was not too impress at all. I purhcased this 2 week ago, with 2 extra battery, travel bag, external VGA/Cat-5 network adapter (since I am traveling a lots and need a small notebook to do my work while traveling). Upon receive, it looks very cool, small and liteweight, but after use it, I am kind of disappoint, it is SLOW ( may be I get used to my 14.1 2.0G CPU, vs of this Atom slow CUP, for sure is slow). I know I can not return it, so I am planning to sell on eBay with discount, it can not really do my works at all (my wife is upset with me to only useit for few days and few hundred off to sell on ebay). I guess the Windows Vista Home and netbook CPU(Atom) is the main reason make it slow, most netbook come with XP (take less memory). [...]

   Also, the display text is too small to read(but it display all content within this high res. small LCD, make sense), I have to set text font to 150%, but compare to my regular notebook 14.1 notebook still small. I would say, overall, this notebook can funcion as checking email and browse internet and looks cool, if you need a very small notebook and not too worry about speed and storage space for your daily simple works, this is good one.
   
   by the way, key board size and battery life is pretty good, I like it.
   
   jeff

5. 

   George L on December 11, 2009 at 8:58 am

   Maybe I got a fluke, but Sony’s so-called “full laptop” computer in an 8″ form factor is like trying to run Vista on your mom’s old P3. Seriously, this thing absolutely crawls. All this would be acceptable were it not for the very mediocre battery life (forget 4 hours, I couldn’t even manage 2 with moderately heavy use), when any other netbook (that’s right, netbook) for well under half the price outperforms it in battery life AND performance. Ironic; the 1.33Ghz processor really is a step down from the 1.66Ghz Atoms in netbooks, despite what I’ve been told to the contrary about the different “architecture.”

   But that’s just on the hardware front. It powers on fast enough, but right from the get-go you’re slammed with loads of bloatware and tons of programs that are slow to load into memory, one after the other (that’s right, it’s not even a dual core). These can be uninstalled–though not cleanly, as they leave some registry junk data behind. But there’s little that can be done about yet another software-related problem: drivers. The video driver on here is one of the worst experiences I’ve had to date with video displays. HD video was an absolute disaster, even though the chipset (google “Poulsbo” or GMA500) claims it to be able to decode 720p HD video. So when I tried to play a simple HQ youtube vid (not even HD) and met with stuttering far worse than my friend’s Asus Eee PC, which cost about 350, I was understandably upset. As for the faster disk drive with the SSD, this may be true. But when you can’t run even basic productivity apps at full speed, any HD speed increase was unnoticeable. My Eee for instance has a conventional “slow” HD but gets the job done (except for copying files) much more quickly.

   A lot of this might be Vista’s fault. But before you think of downgrading to the faster, lighter XP, let me warn you–you’ll have even more issues with Sony’s drivers. Linux? Forget about it; Intel’s Poulsbo drivers are in a pitiful state there too. When the most appealing attribute of the system–the hi-res screen, mind you–is nearly unusable with any other options, one can’t help but feel a bit ripped off. The webcam’s quality isn’t very good (the Eee wins again), and the WWan (mobile broadband) is locked to Verizon, so don’t think about other companies unless you “unlock” the chip: more time and trouble. The wireless-N support is supposed to be great, but it was dodgy on my home network (maybe it was just my unit or config…or vista, but again, my other devices worked fine). They keyboard and ergonomics are fine, but again, the only good words for this unit, for this price, are surface-deep.

   Parting advice: the reviews on this “Lifestyle PC” are low for good reason. I really wish I’d seen Amazon’s reviews earlier. (This unit wasn’t from Amazon but from Sony themselves).