One of the surprise announcements (in fact, some sort of “one more thing” by Sony Europe's president, Fujio Nishida) from the Sony IFA 2009 press event was that regarding the development of the company's X Series of Vaio ultra-portable notebooks, an ultra-thin portable computing system being able to rival pretty much every other such product available on the market, at least from the point of view of its design and aesthetics.

Now, as far as the tech specs are concerned, the new computing system from Sony is still a bit mysterious. Sure, we're talking about an 11-inch system built on a platform requiring a very small amount of power, but it's still not quite clear whether it will be an Atom CPU or one of the C-ULV ones (or both, since more than one model from the X-Series will arrive on the market).

What we know for sure, though, it that it will pack 2GB of RAM, while in the same time relying on SSD units for storage (apparently, starting at around 120GB), which will certainly boost up the price tag. Connectivity-wise, the device will actually be pretty standard, featuring USB ports, an SD/Memory Stick slot, a WWAN SIM slot, VGA output, RJ45 for wired Ethernet LAN and a Kensington lock.

As expected, the design of the Sony system is indeed very impressive, the quality of the build being beyond expectations for an ultra-portable. Moreover, the fact that it combines a carbon-fibre chassis with an aluminum keyboard makes it extremely light, the overall weight (sans the battery) being of just around 700 grams.

The X-Series notebooks will be powerful enough to run Windows 7 with no major problems, and is scheduled to arrive on the market before the year's end. The only problem is that the price point will be way above that of the other ultra-portables available out there, namely somewhere in the 1,000 – 2,000 Euro range, which might make these things way too expensive for most consumers to actually afford.


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