Sony Vaio U71P Review

I’ve decided to post this up as it would be good to look over this Sony Ultra Portable as an alternative to the new Nokia 770. It beats the Nokia in terms of storage options since you can plug in a 20GB/30GB Hard disk, Compact Flash or Memory Stick whilst the Nokia supports only the RS-MMC storage

The Sony unit comes in two flavors, the U-50 & U-71. There are three differences between the two models which are otherwise identical. The U-50 comes with a Celeron 900 MHZ processor, 256 MB of RAM, and Windows XP Home Edition. The more powerful U-70 comes with a Pentium M Dothan processor running at 1.1 GHZ, 512 MB of RAM, and Windows XP Pro Edition. It weights at 550 grams (1.22lbs), comes in black only with a standard battery life of 2.5 hours and 5.5 hours with optional hi-capacity battery (Nokia’s estimate - 3 hours). So basically, the Sony will feel like a rock in your pants compared to the Nokia 770 that’s lighter at 230g. The display graphics chip is an integrated chipset 855M sharing 64MB with main memory. The display resolution is bigger (800 x 600 ) compared to the Nokia’s 800×480 display.

Whilst the Nokia 770 runs on the Debian Linux v2.6 (Maemo), the Sony Vaio uses the Windows XP Home Edition. It’s therefore more vulnerable to viruses and spyware if you don’t have a good virus or firewall software running on it.

So SONY or NOKIA ? I did have a go at this Sony baby at the Sony Style (KLCC Malaysia) store a few weeks back and I felt the price was a bit too high for the average Joe (RM6000 plus / USD 2255 ) . All in all, I would prefer the Nokia 770 as it would be lighter, cheaper and more robust since it has a Linux OS with an estimated price of just USD 350.

Check out the other Sony Vaio U71P and Nokia 770 reviews.

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