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Va-Va-Va-Vaio! Sony's Sexy Subnote

Vaio 505GX sports Pentium MMX-266 CPU, larger keyboard, and ultrathin design, but watch out for that $2699 price tag.

By Vince Bielski, PCWorld   

The 505GX's ultrathin and light design is indeed appealing, but its $2699 price should give you pause. When you're done admiring the system's sleek profile (less than an inch thick) and chic silver-and-purple decor, note the 10-inch-wide keyboard--the unit's most important breakthrough feature. The cramped 9-inch keyboards on most subnotebooks, including the Hitachi VisionBook Traveler 3000 and the Mitsubishi Amity CN, make typing on them a painstaking chore. The extra inch on the 505GX creates a world of difference, giving you just enough room for touch-typing.

The Vaio 505GX is configured with a Pentium MMX-266 CPU (slow for a standard notebook but fast for a subnote), a 256KB secondary cache, 32MB of RAM, a 10.4-inch active-matrix screen, a 2.1GB hard drive, an internal 56-kbps K56flex modem, and Windows 98. (Its sibling, the 505G, comes with a PMMX200 CPU for $1999.)

The 505GX won't win any performance championships, but our shipping unit moved through the business applications in our PC WorldBench 98 suite at a decent clip and didn't feel much slower than a conventional notebook.

As other vendors follow Sony's lead (Sharp's Actius A100 Ultra-Light, due this fall, has a similar physical profile), the price of these ultrathin subnotebooks should drop. Our advice: Ooh and ah now, but wait a few months to let competition pull down prices.

For the complete story, see the upcoming October issue of PC World magazine.