Sony working on two ultraportables: one with Chrome OS, one

nvkhkhr

Prime VIP
sony_vaio_p11-1.png

Sony is known for its ultraportable VAIO laptop, so perhaps it was only a matter of time before they responded to the new MacBook Air with an ephemerally thin laptop of their own. Curiously, though, when that new VAIO comes, it might beat the MacBook Air to the punch by adopting the new ThunderBolt standard… as well as a more eyebrow arching rumor about at least one of the VAIOs running Google’s Chrome OS.
According to reports, the new VAIO would be an ultrafast portable with a Core i7 processor, an SSD drive, HDMI 1.4, WiFi and a weight of just under 2.5 pounds. That’s as a laptop: dock this notebook and all of a sudden it would turn into a full desktop system with a Radeon HD6700M GPU, a Blu_Ray burner and full expansion ports including Ethernet and VGA, as well as a unique connector that would merge the USB ports with its AC power. Thunderbolt is also rumored.
Basically, by offloading the beefier hardware to the docking station, Sony intends for this notebook (codenamed Hybrid PC) to have all-day battery life when around town, without skimping on performance. Sony thinks that battery life away from the dock would be between eight and sixteen hours, which is just unfathomable.
But wait, there’s more! sony is also working on an 11.6-inch Chrome OS “netbook” that would use an NVIDIA Tegra 2 SoC instead of an Atom CPU. That would give it long battery life and relatively fast graphics. The other specs look pretty paltry, including a maximum of 1GB of RAM, but Chrome OS’s low overhead should make that a non-issue. Storage would be up to 16GB, and either 3G or 4G support would come built right in.
My big question is what the point of using Tegra 2 is if you’re running Chrome OS, which limits functionality to the web anyway. Tegra 2’s graphic performance is all about native apps, not HTML5 ones.
 
Top