New Sony Vaio P, a nice evolution rather than a real revolution

As you must be aware of by now, Sony introduced a new upgrade of its ultra tiny Vaio P around the world. Not yet available in the Stores, we had the chance however, to secure a review unit in order to get to the bottom of this upgrade and check if this new Vaio P is really worth the few more bucks that Sony are asking.

Sony Vaio P
- Atom Z530 @ 1.60GHz
- 2 GB SDRAM
- 64GB Of SSD
- WiFI / WiMax
- 8” LCD with a 1600 x 768 resolution
- 0.619 Kg / 1.36 lbs

First Impression
Relatively similar to the First Vaio P, our newest edition however, comes with many little improvements as well as some design tweaks. Keeping the same Hi-res screen, our Vaio P with its 8” 1600 x 768 monitor comes now, like most of the compact notebooks, with a kind of optical sensor provided on the left of the screen and mouse buttons on the right. Unlike the previous Generation both the power switch and Wireless Lan Switch are now located on the side of our Vaio P rather than on its front. Add to this are a new set of colors and “Voila” the only major differences between our 2 generations of Vaio P.

Every day Usage
Although “physically” speaking our new Vaio P does not feature much change after all, things get more interesting once you boot-up our little new wonder … By default, Sony revised the Vaio P specs and now bring more RAM with 2GB instead of 1GB, a more powerful CPU with an Atom Z530 @ 1.6Ghz instead of the usual Z520 and its 1.33Ghz, and by default 64GB of SSD in place of the usual HDD.

On the paper this may sound already much for most of you, however, there is even more to it. First of all, it is when you start using the Vaio P on a daily basis that you notice how faster this New P is compared to the previous stock generation. Added to this, there is now better power management bring-up thanks to Sony’s hardware change and software optimization, a battery life announced at 5.5h instead of the previous 4h hours.
Feeling “lighter”, Windows 7 runs pretty smoothly for your everyday tasks on this new Vaio P, and we do not have much to complain about it. Sure we would love to be able to watch full HD Videos running smoothly or to hook a “Blu-Ray” player and watch our favorite movies on-the-go, but come on, let’s be reasonable here. We agree that it would indeed be pretty nice but the Vaio P may just be a little bit underpowered in its stock version to be fully capable of giving us this yet, then why don’t we keep on enjoying our average DivX and a bit of Hulu on-the-go?

Now we appreciate our new Vaio P’s specs bump, but there are also 3 new gizmos in our new computer that are worth mentioning and that do really make this new P worth checking if you are looking for a compact and stylish notebook.

The very first noticeable improvement comes with the addition of an optical keypad on the left of the screen and mouse button on its right. Far more than just a simple gadget, this new mouse is in fact extremely useful when holding the Vaio P with your 2 hands standing up or in a crowded environment. The second very useful thingy is our Vaio P’s movement sensor that will automatically rotate your screen orientation if you are tilting the Vaio P to the left or to the right giving you a nice screen real-estate for either reading articles on the web or any kind of e-Book.

Sony also extended these features to its proprietary Photo software preview allowing to you to jump from a picture to another by simply flicking the Vaio P to the left or to the right.

The last but not the least, it comes with the Vaio P Support of the PS3 Remote Play and Remote Keyboard. Like your PSP, our P is now capable of giving you direct access to your PS3 just as your PSP and does pretty much everything that Sony are allowing you with the Remote Play. If indeed you can hook-up your Vaio P to a PS3, the reality is however quite disappointing… The overall experience on Wireless (N) for us was sluggish and dead slow, accessing to Video stored on the PS3 was a real pain and we just had frozen pictures with audio only. Switching from a menu to another was incredibly slow, something that our PSP was doing smoothly just before we tested the Vaio P with the PS3.

Conclusion
If you put aside the PS3 Remote Play that was more than impressive as we were expecting it to be, Sony’s new Vaio P is indeed a nice evolution of the old Vaio P. if you have not yet invested in this product but have been looking for a nice “excuse” to get one, well we can only recommend you to do so, you won’t regret it but bear in mind that an Atom-powered PC will never replace a Core 2 Duo, i3 or i5 one.
So if basic word processing, Email, Web, and light photo editing (Crop, resize), Photo viewing and basic Video playing are what you need on-the-go, the Vaio P with its awesome Screen is a dead winner for us !