Sony VAIO Lifestyle VGN-P688E/R 8-Inch Laptop - Red
 List Price: $999.99 |
Product Details
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Product Description
Customer Reviews
Chesterfieldian but Slow and Difficult to UseI was looking for an ultraportable computer for read-through emails and light internet browsing while travelling. Weight, bulk and speed were my considerations. This Sony seemed to fill the bill; I tried it for a day; but returned it because it was so difficult to use. First of all, it is not "pocket sized" unless you are wearing fool pants. The deal breaker for me were the tiny keyboard and tiny impress, I had to squint hard and got a headache within half an hour of playing with it. There is a magnifying looking-glass feature so parts of the screen can appear larger but to transition from one extent to a larger size print entails a momentary blurring which is very obdurate on the eyes. I also had to squint to type properly as the keyboard is quite trifling and there is a tendency to misstype even though my hands and fingers are about average in size for someone who is 180 pounds.
Plainly, it is a much shrunk laptop. Beautiful to schlep around but its small size entails problems that were not resolved. I'd subscribe to it for midgets and elementary school kids but not for any grown up for any use. I ended up purchasing an Ipod Lean up against at a third of the price and weight of this Sony and am delighted with it as it creatively resolved the small keyboard and Lilliputian print problem.
Wonderful travel laptop
I purchased this pad to use as a travel laptop for this purpose, it is great. The display is bright and very understandable (after changing the font DPI to 120 dpi). The keyboard is usable (given the square footage) and the built-in SD card slot comes in handy.
The main unruly with this laptop is that it comes with Vista SP1. After updating the SP2, the performance is much better. I also got the Intel developer drivers from their website and acquainted with the "Have Disk" procedure to update. Now the graphics have reasonable responsiveness too.
I suppose I am going to get the extended battery which essentially doubles the battery soul.
Overall, having purchased this refurbished for 600, I am happy with it. I will most conceivable update to Windows 7 to get even better performance. By the way, the Z series ATOM supports hyper-threading which is almost 2x the perfomance compare favourably with to a dual core.
I wish SONY/INTEL would release a graphics driver that took full asset of the dual stream capability of the GMA500 PowerVR graphics chipset.
For Linux, try the Linux JoliCloud Netbook distro [...].
appraisal is everything
looks like Sony is worrying to botch the netbook market like they did with the mp3 player. Too expensive for less carrying-on, then you can get for 1/2 the price. Sony is turning into the GMC of electronics. Go with ASUS, or ACER.
Darling it for the size not for the perfomance
This is a neat product, in winodws 7 it perform ok, you have to keep in mind is a very small net book made for email et photo storage in a vacation , it like it do the job, do not supersede your home computer whit this...but think if it like a speare tire,
rated 4-5
Active little laptop for travel; bit pricy and perhaps discontinued?
Jotting as advertised and no problems with purchase/delivery issues. Best assess I could find for this item.