It catches eyes, that’s for sure. I had forgotten to load the Sony VAIO U50 with any software before our flight home to Kansas City for the weekend, but since an unexpected storm front was blowing in from the north, we had almost two hours to kill while our plane sat, stranded on the tarmac of LaGuardia. Even scrolling through empty file systems was better than the airline magazine.
“Excuse me,” said the man sitting next to me, and I turned too fast to respond, because I knew he had been staring. “What exactly is that thing, and can you play Spider Solitaire on it?”
Read the rest of my review after the jump.
The Sony U50 is a tiny computer, a byproduct of the continuing Japanese admiration for tiny things — someday they will fit a working machine into an acorn, and you’ll be able to play Spider Solitaire on it — and filigrees the entirety of a modern notebook, minus any optical drives, into a dense, compact brick, a little larger than a paperback; maybe Reader’s Digest size, if twice as thick. Or two and a half cigarette packs, with a Butterfinger laid across the top, to use the standard metric. It’s a good size, and while it seems heavy at first, and sort of brittle, and fragile, it is on the whole a comfortable size for holding on to with two hands, although with one it feels as if it is about to slip from your compressed fingertips when, say, walking through the C terminal at O’Hare, staring at disbelief at a Net Stumbler screen that doesn’t register a single WiFi access point. It’s heavy enough that even if I had braved using the lanyard attached to the teardrop-shaped stylus (as much jewelry as tool), I wouldn’t have trusted it to hold its weight, even though (especially because) it is a review unit.
Review units are odd, too. If you take one in the bathroom to watch streaming video over 802.11g, and a little drop of urine gets on the screen, do you tell the person that you’re going to return the unit to that you had a little accident? Would that affect the resale value? I was, at that moment, very glad I was the first one to open this particular unit. I will be wary of any future review units that come already opened.
But that’s exactly the sort of way I found myself using the U50, in the bathroom, or lounging on a futon reading videogame forums. It makes an amazing Bookworm machine, especially the offline, fullscreen version. Though the pop-up, on-screen keyboard (or handwriting recognition software, when I could bear it) sufficed for punching in the occasional URL and the integrated joystick mouse was perfect, the included fold-up USB keyboard is awkward to use in almost any position except on a desk, in combination with the docking station, which leaves the U50 at an inclined angle.
I had a hard time convincing myself, but after many contorted sessions on airplanes, couches, and picnic tables, I came to conclusion that the U50, with a keyboard, was less usable than a laptop. Not only is it too small to fit on a lap, the fold-up keyboard only locks to close the unit, not keep it open, leaving it to slap shut when balanced on the knees. To make matters worse, without the docking station the U50 isn’t wide enough to stand up on its own and has no flip-out stand, meaning that using it on a table requires hovering directly oven the unit laid flat on a table, screen up, towards the sky. If you put the keyboard on the table behind the unit and wrap your arms around it, you can sort of manage a workable position for a good ten or twenty minutes before your spine begins to seize. The saving grace of the USB keyboard and its cursed Japanese layout is the little black touchpoint nubbin, which allows you to keep your hands on the keyboard at all times.
Hunched over the U50 is a position I found myself in a lot, though, bourbon or no. The screen is crisp, or something more than crisp, I guess, because that’s how I would describe a potato chip, and this screen is crystalline. At no time did I wish for a higher resolution than its native 800 by 600 — although it can fake it up to 1,600 by 1,200 by scrolling the screen around — and even small fonts were readable from the two to three feet, arm’s length, that I held the U50 from my eyes. One of the silver buttons on the front, which light up in a pleasing Tron-like fashion when pressed, controlled the brightness, and for a time, I had accidentally left it on the middle setting. When I discovered my mistake, and returned the display back to full brightness, it was like coming up on a considerable amount of psychotropic chemicals. It was like everything on the screen before had been a dream, man, and now I was truly seeing.
There’s no doubt the 900MHz Celeron-powered U50 is an impressive device. I flaunted the U50 at a BBQ, thrusting in into the hands of my friends, enjoying the almost inevitable response, as they at first reckoned it an over-large PDA, next noticed it was running Windows XP Pro, just like a real computer, then discovered more and more features, usually set over the edge with the knowledge that, inside, lived a 20GB hard drive. “No shit?” I heard quite a bit, and my good friend John Sandy stood cradling the U50 for a good ten minutes, noodling with its various features and pausing only to periodically look at me and mouth, “Wow.”
And I agree with him. It’s very much a wow device, and one I’d be happy to add to my arsenal, but not for $2,000+ (the price importers like Kemplar, who provided the test unit to me, would charge for the U50; $500 or so more for its faster sister, the U70). I kept thinking of that video review where that guy, clearly drunk with his purchase, kept lisping that the U50 (or U70, in that case) was, “truly the future of computing.” It is, but it’s a future where the U50 can be purchased as an inexpensive interface to my network; a future where I don’t mind shattering the U50 on the bathroom tile or dunking it in the bath because I can purchase another one without a second thought; a future where I already have a laptop for doing real work, and would like to pick something up to keep next to the bed, with the convenience of a PDA, but none of the limitations.
