If you’ve already read our review of the new P Series you’ll know we remain unconvinced that the sacrifices you need to make in return for its tiny size are worth it. However, we’re also reasonable people who are willing to admit that some people will adore the P Series – even the old one.

The chief project manager, Kazuya Suzuki (pictured right), the force behind the project, is one such man. He explained that the VAIO brand was already associated with small PCs, and the idea behind the original VAIO P Series was to take it one step further.

“With the first VAIO P, before we even started, we wanted to find out what kind of device we could consider. Everybody is already using a mobile phone, but to bring both mobile phone and PC into a small type of PC, we thought what is necessary? A mobile phone is missing the keyboard experience, and a high-resolution LCD for a rich-information display.”

Which led me to ask the obvious question: was Sony seriously thinking the P Series could replace the phone? “No, we weren’t thinking of replacing mobile phones,” Mr Suzuki explained patiently. “It’s more to accompany mobile phones. The key idea is to deliver an experience that a mobile phone alone can’t give you. A bigger display, a full keyboard.”

The keyboard is the key. Sony wanted to create a PC that was as small as possible while keeping as big a keyboard as possible. In fact, almost all the design decisions for the original P Series stemmed from the keyboard: how could Sony make a full PC in a machine that size?

Many people – including PC Pro – criticised Sony for making the resolution of the display so high, so it was interesting to hear the justification. “We started with 768 pixels,” said Suzuki, though an interpreter, “we wanted to make that the minimum height. So the horizontal resolution is dictated by the size of the screen.”

What’s new in the second generation P Series is the addition of sensors: the touchpad, the accelerometer, the GPS chip and the digital compass. What I found fascinating is how practical the approach was: no multi-million pound simulations here, just a man with a vision of a feature that could be used in practice.

According to Mr Suzuki, the idea of the touchpad came from watching how people use the P Series in practice. They’d hold the unit halfway along the base, with their thumbs resting on either side of the screen. Wouldn’t it make sense, he thought, if he could add a trackpoint and mouse buttons where their thumbs rested? So he did: he made a working unit by patching together a sensor and buttons – you can see an early prototype’s left- and right-click mouse buttons below.

He then took this working prototype to his colleagues, made them use it, realise he was a genius and Sony signed off on the idea. The end result can now be seen in our review. Another idea – that of a rotating screen, so people can read web pages or even eBooks vertically – was signed off with rather more ease.

Why not add a touchscreen, I asked? “With this resolution and with this OS, actually using your fingers the accuracy isn’t quite the right match. If you were to use touch on it then you’d need to use a different OS than Windows 7, with new applications.

“It’s true that there’s a cost influence on it too. A lot of technology of the future is squeezed into this device already, and if you want to add a new feature like a touchscreen then it could become thicker. Plus, in a clamshell type laptop, it’s not so ergonomic – if you touch it then it falls over.”

Next time maybe, I suggested. They laughed. “We’ll look into it.”

The design

So that’s the core new features explained. But, having seen the bright orange P Series we reviewed, you may well be wondering exactly why Sony chose such a bold design for the new P Series.

“We wanted to appeal further to a younger audience,” explained Akari Hoshi (pictured above right). “Looking into the market there’s a very similar [laptop] design such as the glossy and the metallic finish, and the four corners are [always] a rounded shape. This design identity is very commoditised in the current PC market.”

Sony’s designers didn’t believe everyone was satisfied with such a concept, so set about rewriting the rules for the P Series. “We wanted to make a soft, easy and nice impression, so the designer picked up a towel as a design reference. It’s really soft-feeling and rough-looking [so] is very interesting.”

Ms Hoshi (who, incidentally, was utterly charming) explained this led to a “wrap” design, following the folds of a towel. “This wrapping design is really nice and fresh, and looking down both the sides there are no protrusions – nothing sticking out. It’s a very simple design. For the colour and material, matte and solid was the key concept.”

This goes against the current fashion of glossy and metallic. “The benefit for users is we can avoid the fingerprints on the LCD-side cabinet. And also the colours – we picked five colours. We chose very vitalising colours, and we think this colourisation is not eccentric but an accent for your fashion, for your life.”

According to Ms Hoshi, the colours may be new and bold for laptops but aren’t new in themselves. “You can see these colours in your kitchen, in your stationery, in fashion.”

They picked orange rather than red because they saw it as energising. “Green is for the more sporty and more young men. Pink is more pop, especially for young women, and black is for men and standard for business.”

The internals

While everyone’s going to notice the difference in the outward design, to true nerds what’s even more interesting is what Sony’s done to the P Series inside. The photo above gives some idea: the left-hand machine is the old P Series, with a larger motherboard and a little less space for the battery. On the right, you can see the motherboard’s been squeezed down and the SSD almost integrated onto it.

All this has allowed Sony to squeeze in a little more capacity: the old P Series used a 2,100mAh battery, the new one 2,500mAh. On its own that would only give a 19% boost, but as our tests show the new P Series actually survived for 5hrs 17mins compared to 3hrs 11mins. (You may see Sony claiming a battery life of over nine hours, but that’s with the high-capacity battery that doesn’t come as standard.)

So where’s the rest of the time come from? The biggest boost is due to Intel’s Pine Trail platform, which we’ve seen improve battery life of recent netbooks across the board. And, because the £799 model we tested used Parallel ATA rather than Serial ATA, Sony can dump the SATA bridge circuitry. Allegedly, that saves 25 minutes. Another nine minutes comes from more efficient software, with a further nine minutes due to new circuitry for the power and Ethernet connections.

Upstream design

Sony claims that this sort of innovation is still just the start. It’s reorganised the structure of its VAIO division and moved it wholesale to Nagano, which is around three hours’ drive away from Tokyo: only the designers have stayed in Japan’s capital.

By having all the engineers in one place, it’s instigated what it calls “upstream design”. Previously a product would go through a series of stages where one team – say the electric, mechanism and process technology engineers – would put together a prototype, and then it would be sent back to the marketing team for approval before going to a new team of engineers focused on the actual production process.

At that point, they may discover the machine isn’t reliable enough – and the whole process would go back to square one. Together with Sony’s new two-division strategy, it’s hoping the approach will mean more products going to market and more quickly. Time will tell.

The most exciting of the new models is the EasyNote TR series, which takes a leaf out of Apple and Sony’s books by concentrating on design just as much as hardware. And it’s not just any old in-house designers who are putting together these latest laptops, either – Packard Bell has enlisted the help of Italian design house Pininfarina to make sure that the TR can match up to the best in the business.

A glance at the chassis reveals that the experiment has paid off: the TR is stylish without being garish and includes several neat touches. While the lid is finished in a glossy black that’ll surely become a fingerprint magnet, the interior boasts a good-looking matte coating that brings to mind the far more expensive, and revered, Sony VAIO AW-series.

Sound design

The speakers, meanwhile, seem to be totally original: while they still sit above the keyboard, they sweep upwards when the laptop is open, meeting the edge-to-edge screen in a seamless curve – it’s a good look, and we were pleased to note that the curved speaker didn’t protrude from the laptop when the lid was closed, although this did make the back end of the machine feel a bit bulkier than your average 15.4in notebook.

We’re also assured that the Dolby technology inside the curved speakers will make the TR sound as good as Toshiba and HP’s premium machines, which come with harmon/kardon and Altec Lansing speakers respectively and are routinely best-in-class for audio quality.

The keyboard has flat rather than traditional bevelled keys and, in the short time we had to try them out, the individual keys felt comfortable with a reasonably positive typing action – although, like the new range of netbooks, the base of the keyboard still felt a little spongy.

The trackpad was better: wide, responsive and with two good buttons, it includes the multi-touch functions that are also incorporated into the new series of netbooks: move two fingers towards and away from each other to zoom in and out, for instance, and rotate a finger from a right-hand corner to the centre of the trackpad to scroll a document up and down. The same motion from the left hand side rotates a document or picture, and swishing two fingers horizontally across the pad skips to the next picture in a series.

Inside, the Packard Bell is a little less exciting: Core 2 Duo processors, Nvidia GeForce GT graphics chips and decent-sized hard disks and allocations of RAM are the order of the day – so it sounds as if the new TR series will be a stylish and comfortable notebook without really innovating on a hardware level.

T is the magic number

As well as the new TR series, Packard Bell also introduced a few more notebooks. While the EasyNote NJ, TJ and LJ-series machines don’t benefit from the Pininfarina design that made the TR look so special, they’re reasonable-looking machines that also have multi-touch trackpads, decent keyboards and what felt like solid build quality – although, during our brief time with the machines, the screens did appear to be a touch too reflective and a mite too pale for our liking.

Inside, again, little has changed – with Core 2 Duo processors, Nvidia graphics chips and all the requisite bells and whistles, we can expect these notebooks to be good performers without excelling themselves in our comprehensive benchmark suite.

Packard Bell isn’t resting on its laurels, either, after its buyout by Acer earlier this year. We’ve been assured than an 18in version of the TR-series will be released in time for Christmas, and that the majority of the new machines will be available in several colours and configurations, ranging from 14 to 17in screens and white, black, blue and red exteriors.

These new notebooks could make a return to form for a revered old brand, then – one that’s been around since 1926 but, recently, has been delivering merely average notebooks that don’t stir the soul in the way that those from Sony, Apple or Dell manage.

It’s looking up for Packard Bell, then, and we’ll deliver our definitive verdict as soon as we get our hands on any of these new notebooks in the PC Pro Labs.

It’s clearly aimed at the more female of the world’s population, so I gauged the reaction of two ladies who happened to be passing the HP stand. And very positive it was too. “It’s gorgeous,” one replied, and when I asked whether she could see herself with one the answer was again a definite yes. “The only problem would be if I was to take it out of work, with all the flowers, I’m not sure I’d be taken very seriously in a meeting.” Still, both of them seemed convinced that it was worth the extra $200 over the standard (and much more boring looking) Mini 1000.

Even if the styling wasn’t quite so much to my tastes, I was taken by the keyboard. It’s simply a joy to type on, with a tactile feel and lots of space for the keys – HP claims it’s 92% the size of a normal keyboard. The only quirk is the mouse buttons being placed to either side of the touchpad rather than below it, but this should be easy enough to adapt to.

It’s difficult to judge a screen when on a showfloor, but despite its glossy finish it didn’t look too reflective. There was also no graininess, and the colours looked vibrant – overall, it impressed. Don’t expect a startling resolution, though, with HP opting for a 1,024 x 576 resolution across the 10.1in diagonal.

The rest of the specs are familiar for a netbook: a 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB of RAM and a 60GB hard disk. With a three-cell battery in place, we’d expect battery life somewhere between two and three hours.

Disappointingly, there’s no embedded 3G modem in the UK version and no draft-n WLAN – you’ll have to make do with 802.11bg and Bluetooth.

So essentially you’re paying all the extra money for the design. As the HP rep on the stand said to me, “welcome to fashion”. And, if it’s any consolation, you do get a rather fetching embroidered sleeve as part of the package.

Sure, there have been some backward steps, too – such as the outrageous display of bigotry that was California’s Proposition 8 – but on the whole, things are getting better. Personally, the prospect of marriage in any form is terrifying, but if it’s available at all, then it should be available to all.

Besides narrow-minded folk, there is another group of people that may have a problem with the whole thing: database designers. I don’t mean to imply that they’re homophobic (although I can’t guarantee that some aren’t), but only that gay marriage is going to cause them a lot of headaches.

Across the world there are millions of databases, programs and online forms that cannot even comprehend the possibility that a man could marry a man, or that a woman could marry a woman. It simply does not compute, and it’s being called the Y2Gay bug.

“To be blunt, the systems aren’t set up to handle it,” says database engineer Sam Hughes in a wonderfully insightful blog post.

“The paper forms have a space for the husband’s name and a space for the wife’s name. Married people carefully enter their details in block capitals and post the forms off to depressed paper-pushers who then type that information into software front-ends whose forms are laid out and named in precisely the same fashion. And then they hit “submit” and the information is filed away electronically in databases which simply keel over or belch integrity errors when presented with something so profound as a man and another man who love each other enough to want to file joint tax returns.”

Hughes goes on to suggest a number of possible fixes, many of which come with their own, unique problems. The field is a young one, and there a lot of unsolved problems – or, at least, ones that are awaiting a sensible solution.

“Perhaps the simplest solution would be to ban marriage outright. Or, better yet, to declare everybody as married to everybody else. But then what would the database engineers do all day?”