Sony Vaio P

The Sony Vaio P series are a range of ultraportable subnotebook computers launched in January/February 2009.

It was marketed as a "lifestyle PC", although they share many characteristics with netbook computers.

The Sony Vaio P series features an 8" LED-backlit display with native resolution of 1600x768, coupled with Intel GMA 500 graphics, an Intel Atom MID Z5x0 CPU with Intel US15 chipset with 2GB of DDR2 RAM. Notably, the P Series sports non-upgradeable RAM that is soldered to the main board and some iterations of the P Series have just 1GB of RAM. It uses a pointing stick in the keyboard as its pointing device. Exact specs vary by location. An integrated webcam (optional in some regions of the world) is located on the upper right corner. It also features built-in GPS (some models), Bluetooth, 802.11 b/g/n wireless and 3G or HSDPA mobile broadband. Like most ultraportables and netbooks, it does not have an optical drive.

At launch, the pre-installed operating system was one of the 32-bit versions of Windows XP Pro, which has lower resource requirements than Windows Vista. Several people have succeeded in installing various versions of Linux on the Vaio P, most notably Ubuntu Linux (Version 9.04, Jaunty). Ubuntu is arguably the best alternative due to its ease of installation and configuration, and the fact that full 3D graphics can be utilized with this setup. Since the release of Windows 7, the P series now ships with that OS installed. The P series has been criticised for poor performance in part due to the excessive pre-installed software, but also because of the poor performance of the included GMA graphics chipset.

Compared with most other small Intel Atom-based computers, which are typically described as netbooks, the P Series is considerably more expensive. Compared with these other devices, which typically use the Atom N2x0 CPU, however, the P Series uses the Atom Z5x0 series, which has slightly lower power requirements, but also lower performance. In addition, the P Series is the lightest device in its class, weighing roughly the same as the Apple iPad 2 and less than all 10" netbooks, and the 7" Asus Eee PC. While its screen is small, in devices of 12.1" and below, the P series is bested only by the 12.1" Thinkpad X200s, which has 1440x900 resolution.

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