While we were able to see a lot of cool stuff from Sony back at our visit to the company's booth at IFA 2009, there were a few things we sort of overlooked, in order to spend more time with other, more popular devices. That's pretty much the case with the company's Vaio W series, its first full-fledged netbooks (the Vaio P is also a netbook, but has quite a different form factor and has thus been labeled a “lifestyle PC”).

However, we've just corrected this “mishap” during a local Sony event, when we had the chance to take a closer and more attentive look at one of the models from this series.

Launched back in July 2009, the Vaio W manages to combine the Vaio trademark values (elegance, power, high price point) with the netbook concept in a fairly interesting manner. The netbook is, quite obviously, extremely lightweight (not as light as the X series, though) and also very thin, measuring just around 267.8mm x 27.5mm x 179.6mm. Plus, as expected from a Vaio product, the quality of the finishing is praise-worthy.

The netbook comes equipped with one of Sony's already well-known LED backlit 10.1-inch displays, which is able to provide an overall resolution of around 1366 x 768 pixels. As far as we were able to see, the displays manages to do its job quite well, even in not particularly good lighting conditions.

On the other hand, on the inside of the Vaio W, series we've got the “classic” netbook configuration, built around the Intel Atom N280 CPU (running at 1.66 GHz), accompanied by 1GB of RAM memory, an Intel GMA 950 graphics adapter, plus Wi-Fi module (b/g/n supported) and all the other accessories encountered in the case of most other similar products available on the market. The device also sports a 250GB HDD unit, plus a battery that provides an estimated functioning life of around seven hours.

The configuration listed above makes the W powerful enough to run Windows 7, but don't expect it to work miracles, because that's really not the case. I mean, one will be able to run a couple of apps (notably, the device also comes pre-loaded with a very interesting and kind of notebook-ish quick access dock-like interface), but if you start to open up more applications, it will eventually start running quite slow.

All in all, our experience with the Sony Vaio W series was a pretty pleasant one, and we can honestly say that this device could represent a very important competitor on the market, especially since pricing is not that different from that of most other netbooks out there (OK, perhaps a “bit” more expensive).


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