The Sony Vaio P was one of the big stories of CES 2009.  It features a form factor that is unique among notebooks, being particularly long and narrow.  The Vaio P, however, is physically very similar to a subnotebook from the early days of Sony laptops, the PictureBook.

The Vaio P series, for the uninitiated, is Sony’s new ultra-netbook or netbook-like ultraportable.  It has a high-resolution 8 inch LED-backlit display, Intel Atom processor, 2GB of RAM and a satellite’s worth of wireless options.  It particularly wide and hallow design sacrifices a trackpad for a touchpoint (eraser-head) mouse instead.  But this allows the whole to weigh only 1.8 pounds, ridiculously light.  I call it an ultra-netbook because it starts at $900, much more than any regular netbook.  And no netbook offers so much in such a small package.

Physically speaking, the Vaio P’s form factor is almost a facsimile of the PictureBooks of yore.  The Sony Vaio PictureBook was in many ways ahead of the curve.  Like its name suggests, it featured a camera/webcam long before that became the norm for notebooks (the Vaio P does indeed have a camera tot he right of the screen, not in the usual place above it).  It was also one of the earlier notebooks to have a memory car slot, even if it only accepted Memory Sticks.  Finally the PictureBook used a Transmeta Crusoe processor.  While the Crusoe chip was ultimately a failure in the market, it did show Intel and AMD that it takes more to make a laptop processor that to just detune a desktop chip.  The Crusoe pioneered many power-management and energy conservation features that were eventually adopted by Intel and AMD.

Back in the day, The PictureBook easily cost over $2000 new.  So I guess the biggest progress made it the past nine years of laptops is not in speed, power or size, but simply price.

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