Thursday, February 6, 2014

Bye-bye, Vaio - Obituary for a notebook Innovator - Heise Newsticker

With Sony’s exit from the PC business, the Vaio brand is likely to disappear in the foreseeable future on the German market – too bad, but the Japanese were always good for special notebooks outside the mainstream .

The news that Sony adopted from the PC business, should surprise only at first glance. The Japanese conglomerate has been writing for years in the red – economically makes the exit from the award-competitive and additionally present because of the boom in the tablet market upheaval so undoubtedly sense

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For customers is the step but a shame and annoying. Not necessarily for those who have recently bought a Vaio Notebook: Sony Germany promises to fulfill all guarantee and warranty claims fully in spite of dropping out. At least in the next few weeks also the one or other new models will come to market. But after that it’s over – and so also likely to be vanishingly small chance that the Japanese developers fix any annoying teething or similar still own initiative out with BIOS or driver updates

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Mobile Innovation

the long term, does the retreat especially hurt because Sony has convinced a long time with innovative notebooks that were unrivaled unique. This not only exotics like the notebook with Transmeta processor are meant from the year 2002: A mobile Schnuckelchen so as not even a half pound lightweight Vaio P in the format of a DIN-Long-envelope it has not since been given. With the extreme widescreen resolution of 1600 × 768 points on 8-inch diagonal, issued in late 2008 little device is already a high-DPI display with fine 225 dpi on board had also – far ahead of Retina MacBook & Co.

Sony Notebook highlights of the past 10 years

Slideshow, 11 pictures

the Ultrabooks had anticipated well before its boom Sony: The 3,000-euro Vaio X505 from 2004, was a 850 grams lighter, extremely thin 10-inch model with Pentium M. end of 2009 they had an even lighter Vaio X New edition with 11-inch screen, SSD drive and an integrated UMTS. The price was around 1,500 euros already significantly more affordable, even if it only worked a Atom CPU and no more potent Core i processor.

Those who needed a lot of power on the go at that time, but were not excluded: they had to stop access only to the Vaio Z, which combined the thickest Sony dual cores with additional graphics chips. Nevertheless, the 13-inch model was one of the lightest of its kind In later versions of the device anno 2011 outsourced Sony optical drive, and the graphics chip in an external housing. The connection of the GPU was implemented via a fiber-optic link; strictly with Light Peak, the optical-proprietary predecessor of Thunderbolt. Speaking of interfaces: Sony RECOURSE Firewire – sorry: i.Link – more faithful than many other notebook manufacturers – one had the standard but helped to develop themselves. For the same reason, it was already early Blu-ray drives, and long memory stick reader in the notebooks.


foreseeable end

In recent years it has been quiet around Sony, although the Japanese were able to deal with devices such as the Vaio S, a powerful yet lightweight 15-inch flat-man, still brands. No later than mid-2013 were the first signs of the beginning of the end but seen: The portfolio was radically slashed and has been dominated by the ubiquitous hybrid devices and removable bread-and-butter machines. The latter although there was previously already, but just in addition to the high-priced specialty and niche products that colored the image significantly.

the sale of the PC division, which included All-in-Ones except notebooks last, is not to say that there will be no more Vaios. Most likely, however, that the designated buyer JIP (Japan Industrial Partners Inc) can appear only on the home market of Japan, such devices in the future. Other companies such as NEC or Sharp are exclusively active there, because in Japan you can buy like with local flavor – especially instead of products of the big neighbor China, with which one yes, among other supplies to political and military skirmishes around islands

That it is quiet around the Vaio notebooks now, is actually quite well to be understood literally: For the low fan noise in laptops, the Japanese were whether the many power in the smallest space never famous. (mue)

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