Mini-Notebook PC Puts Power in your Lap

by Jim Bray

Sony's PictureBook notebook PC's perform an interesting balancing act between size and capability.

I've been playing with the tiny PCG-C1VP ($2000), which is almost as small as a handheld device of a few years ago and definitely one of the, if not the, smallest fully-featured notebook PC's around. It's easy to hold in your hand and diminutive enough to fit into the smallest of briefcases.

Yet it's powerful enough for most mainstream use. The Sony comes with a Transmeta Crusoe CPU running at 677 MHz, which isn't nearly as fast as some notebook computers these days; but I found it fast enough for my needs. The PC comes with what they call "LongRun Power Management System" designed to keep the thing humming remotely as long as possible, including a handy "sleep" mode that saves battery life.

The onboard RAM of my tester was 128 Meg, and it had a 15 gigabyte hard drive.

So while these specs indicate a notebook computer that isn't completely state-of-the-art, it's close enough for most people's real world use - and it has other things going for it. Chief among these, of course, is size. The Sony measures less than 10 inches wide, six inches high and about an inch thick when closed!

Of course something has to give when you're making a PC that small and in this case one of the first things you'll notice is the tiny keyboard. It's a full keyboard, but to fit into such a small area it is really crammed in.

It's crammed in well, however, and it only took me an hour or so to get comfortable with it. My chief problem was with the SHIFT keys; I tended to hit the CONTROL key on the left side (it's directly below the SHIFT), and on the right side the SHIFT key is buried in a mass of keys including the cursor controls, CONTROL and ENTER keys. Even here, though, it didn't take me long to get use to it - even with my relatively short and stubby fingers.

You'll also undoubtedly ask "Where's the disc drive?" That's because, as a space saving measure, Sony has dumped the traditional floppy and/or CD/DVD drives. So if you want to install software other than what comes with the Vaio, you'll have to get one of the optional external drives. Drive choices include CD-RW, DVD-ROM, USB floppy drive, and a 16X max. CD-ROM drive.

This seems like a huge omission, and Sony really should have included one of these drives in the not-inexpensive price of these units - or, better still, given you the option of choosing which drive you want included in your configuration (I would have chosen a DVD ROM).

It really depends on what you want to do with the PC, of course. For my everyday use all I really need is a portable word processor and since this Vaio comes with MS Word XP installed (which is what I use normally anyway) I had no quibbles.

I might quibbled if I'd actually taken the Vaio on the road, however, and discovered that since there was no drive included with my test unit I couldn't play games in the hotel room. Then again, it would have forced me to do some work…

There are other ways to get your data into or out of the Vaio, of course; the PictureBook also connects via Sony's Memory Stick media, and you can hook in compatible camcorders, digital cameras, and other products with the i.LINK interface. We used the Vaio's PCMCIA slot to hook it into our home network, which made accessing my personal files simple.

The PictureBook comes with a plethora of I/O's besides the abovementioned PCMCIA slot. You get a VGA output, USB, i.LINK (IEEE 1394) S400 interface3, RJ-11 phone jack, audio in, headphone output, and the MagicGate Memory Stick interface. There's also a small set of stereo speakers mounted on the front of the unit (and they're about as good as you'd expect), a monaural microphone, and one of those little "nipple-like" pointing devices.

The PictureBook's small, wide LCD screen measures 8.9" and offers a resolution of 1024 x 480. This gives a nice anamorphic widescreen look to it, and would probably look great with a DVD movie, but I missed seeing more than half a page of a Word or Web document at a time. Still, to get the tiny size of the Vaio I'd be willing to live with the extra scrolling the short monitor makes necessary.

The Sony's graphics, powered by ATI's RAGE MOBILITY graphics chip with 8.0 MB SDRAM are very good, and the notebook offers MPEG1 and 2 digital video and hardware-based MIDI digital audio.

The Vaio also comes with a built-in still and video camera that's mounted atop the screen and rotates180 degrees so you can either shoot yourself or some poor, unsuspecting neighbor. It's a 1/6" CCD camera with a resolution of 350,000 pixels. HDTV it ain't, but it's a pretty neat gadget anyway.

Software that comes out of the box includes that horrid Microsoft Windows Me operating system, though there's an upgrade coupon for WinXP Home and the unit's also rated to run Windows 2000 Professional (which, of those three choices, would be my preferred option). You also get Acrobat Reader, Quicken 2001, McAfee VirusScan, QuickTime, RealPlayer7 Basic, and a bunch of Sony multimedia thingies including DVgate, Media Bar, MovieShaker, OpenMG Jukebox, PictureGear, Smart Capture, and VisualFlow.

Sony claims the standard equipment battery will last for 2.5 - 5.5 hours and optional packs supposedly offer up to 20 hours on a charge.

This is a really nifty notebook whose size and convenience really turned my crank. My only real complaint is the unfortunate lack of an external disc drive as standard equipment. If not for that, this could have been the perfect notebook PC for my lifestyle.

Jim Bray's technology columns are distributed by the TechnoFILE and Mochila Syndicates. Copyright Jim Bray.

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