Sony's P Series - Not a MID, Netbook, or a Good Idea

While in Washington last week, I had a few free minutes and stopped by the amazing Fashion Center Mall at Pentagon City. Let me tell you; no recession there! The place was mobbed with people carrying packages. It looked like Christmas, but, no, it was just Thursday. Anyway, I stopped by the Sony store to try the new VAIO (I never liked that acronym) P Series notebook. This is a very wide (but quite small) form factor reminiscent of the Poqet PC of years ago (I still have mine). The screen resolution is an unusual 1600x900 at eight inches (I told you it was wide), and it has 802.11n, a Verizon WWAN adapter, an SSD option, and GPS. It weighs about 1.4 pounds, and looks thus a bit like a high-end ($900) Mobile Internet Device/netbook/whatever these things are being called these days. But it runs Vista.

And that's a bad idea. Now, my utter contempt for Vista is well known, so you can bet I'm not going to like a product that's based on it. Vista is slow, expensive, hard to use, clunky, and overall a burden and cost center, not a tool. But, and this is the important part, it's also totally unnecessary in a highly-mobile device. LINUX and Open Office should be just fine for most folks, and at a far lower cost with far better performance on the power-conservative processors essential to this class of device.

Sony as a rule designs beautiful products, and this is a beautiful computer (it even comes in colors). But no OS option other than Vista makes it a poor choice for mobile computing, or, at least, what mobile computing needs to be - simple, inexpensive, and easy to use. In short, I want one - but sans Vista.

• Wireless / Mobile
• MID
• Mobile Internet Device
• netbook
• P Series
• Sony
• Windows Vista