Sony's new Windows 7 laptops: CW and X

One is an affordable HD laptop with an optional Blu-ray drive, the other is a carbon-fiber lightweight feather of a notebook with a price that's far from budget. Together, they comprise Sony's Vaio newcomers that are ready to launch along with Windows 7.

Let's start with the sexiest. The Vaio X has been shown off in photo galleries here before, but the details are now confirmed. At half an inch thin, it isn't quite as slim as a Dell Adamo XPS, but its 1.6-pound carbon fiber body makes it the "lightest notebook ever," according to Sony.

Equipped with an 11.1-inch 16x9 LED backlit display that has a scratch-resistant screen, as well as built-in 3G compatible with Verizon, it's definitely an upscale coffee shop notebook if we've ever seen one.

There are more notable features:

• An SSD drive instead of a hard disk drive (64 GB)
• Built-in GPS that doesn't require an internet connection to function
• A multi-touch trackpad that Sony promises will work "like a smartphone"
• Both a standard and long-life battery packaged right in the box, which Sony claims will provide up to 17 combined hours of plug-free work.

Sony Vaio X Series up close

What's not specified is the processor: "Intel processor, 2.0 GHz" is all that's confirmed, but combined with the small screen size, 2GB of DDR2 RAM, and small-size SSD, the suggestion is high-end Netbook. The Vaio X starts at $1,300--not that you'd expect this to be cheap, would you? The Vaio X comes preinstalled with Windows 7 Home Premium, and comes in either gold, as seen above, or black.

The Vaio CW

(Credit: Sony)

On the more affordable end of the spectrum, the CW series also comes preinstalled with Windows 7, but its starting price is a relatively palty $780. Optional Blu-ray drives and a 14-inch 16x9 screen add up to another potentially solid HD-savvy multimedia notebook from Sony.

The CW15FX/P comes with 4GB of DDR3 RAM, a 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, a 320GB hard drive, and an Nvidia GeForce G210M GPU. It sounds good, but we can pretty much guarantee that that particular config won't be the one that costs $780.

Both will be available in time for the launch of Windows 7, which is only a few weeks away.

[tipoo_]

The day I pay over 1300 dollars for any computer that is less powerfull than my FREAKING SEVEN YEAR OLD ATHLON XP...Feel free to kick me in the balls. Hard.

Seriously, at that price an Intel Atom is just unacceptable.

[clsmithj]

Athlon XP used a measly 256kb-512kb L2 cache, it ran on a max bus speed of 166Mhz with memory at 333 using DDR1 PC2700 RAM. Though a 2.0GHz Atom packs 512kb of L2 (which only a few Athlon XP CPUs had at the end of their roadmap) it would probably mop the floor with an Athlon XP with it's DDR2 memory speeds.

[tipoo_]

Nah, ditch the paper numbers and look at some actual benchmarks. In single threaded tasks, the Athlon mops the floor with the Atom, although admittedly the Atom does better at multithreaded apps. Keep in mind, a 1.6GHz Atom is only as powerfull as a 900MHz Celeron for single threaded performance.

[slednut]

SonyStyle confirms the X has the atom processor. . .a $1200 netbook, so much for the dawn of affordable portable computing!

[tipoo_]

It IS sony afterall, if your looking for bang for your buck there are plenty of other netbooks out there.