Review: Sony Vaio W Series

I've spent quite a bit of time with it. Let me now give you my conclusions. Fantastic!

The keyboard, even more fantastic. It doesn't have that eraser little thingy inside that is really irritating on the Sony P. This one has a good trackpad. Springy keys, I love the way these are. These pebble keys, ever since Mac started doing it and everyone started following. Keep doing it, don't change and go back to those ugly keyboards.

Good resolution on a 10" screen. The resolution is not that startling that you start thinking that you've grown really old, because it's not that small in text. Good enough at about 1366x768. Fantastic!

Multimedia seems to be a great focus in this particular product because, in every way possible they've crammed it with multimedia features. Including the fact that you can use it as a DLNA server, which means you can stream from here on to your TV or your playstaion 3. So all of that is good.

So what's not good? Obviously the battery life. I don't think that any netbook in the world should be sold with anything less than eight hours of battery life.

I don't care if that battery sticks out a little, I'll go with ugliness in one part of a netbook if it can give me eight hours of battery life. Three hours on a netbook? The very idea of a netbook is that I can carry it, travel with it, that I don't have to think of carrying an adapter with it. What's the idea if its only three hours?

What's then the final conclusion? The price point. A netbook should be priced at a certain price point. Even if it's premium it can't go way over.

The Sony Vaio P broke that rule. At Rs 50,000 to Rs 60,000, I could have brought three netbooks. This one is priced low (at Rs 29,990) and its priced very attractively for a Sony, but is it priced right for a netbook?

Pros
Keyboard
Multimedia features
Screen size and resolution

Cons
Battery life
Higher-end price tag

Good improvement by Sony yet it could have been better.