The super-slim Series 9 laptop drew many an admiring glance, and Samsung’s Series 7 range looks likely to repeat the trick. In a meeting room at PC Pro, we were given an exclusive first glimpse of the 15.6in Samsung 700Z.

The Samsung 700Z

While the 700Z can’t quite rival the millimetres-thick Series 9, it’s still stunning in the flesh. The dark grey metal chassis is more than a little reminiscent of the old Apple Powerbook G4 (shhh, don’t tell Apple’s lawyers) and the quality of finish on show is superb. The brushed-metal finish stretches all around, with no black plastic underside to ruin the effect. It’s all clean lines, smooth curves, and stiff, flex-free build.

The Samsung rep was especially keen to point out the matte anti-glare finish of the 15.6in, 1,600 x 900 display, and emphasised that matte displays would be becoming standard across Samsung’s entire laptop portfolio. That’s great news for glossy screen haters, and the claimed 300cd/m² brightness rating on the 700Z meant it looked punchy and high-contrast in our brief time with it.

The Series 7 is also the first in Samsung’s line-up to include Diskeeper’s Express Cache technology. Frequently used files are cached into a tiny 8GB SSD embedded onto the motherboard, and Samsung claims boot times and application load times are dramatically improved as a result.

It’s hard to ignore the huge multitouch touchpad. Just like Apple’s glass trackpad, the whole surface clicks under the finger, and multitouch gestures allow for scrolling, zooming and flicking back and forth through web pages. Cursor control is smooth, and unlike some of the buttonless touchpads we’ve seen on Windows laptops, we didn’t have any problems getting right-clicks to register. The soft-touch feel of the backlit keyboard is great under the finger, too; the generous key-spacing and super-wide shift keys tick all the right boxes.

Twin USB 3 ports, USB 2, HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet and a slot-loading DVD writer are present and correct, and that peculiar port on the far right of the picture is a mini-VGA port; there’s a dongle included in the box.

What’s truly stunning, however, is the price: with the SRPs for the basic model starting at just £799, Samsung is clearly trying to make a mark with the Series 7. For that price you get a Core i5-2430M processor, 6GB RAM, a 750GB HDD and integrated Intel HD graphics. Splash out an extra hundred quid, and you can add a dedicated ATI graphics chipset and 8GB RAM to that list. The £999 top-of-the-range model, meanwhile, upps the ante with a quad-core Intel Core i7-2675QM.

Our contacts at Samsung suggested that review units will be doing the rounds in late-September/early-October, so keep your eyes peeled for the full PC Pro review.

The results proved shocking but, when it comes down to it, that software is pretty easy to deal with – it’s just a matter of uninstalling everything and, if you’re really particular, running an app like CCleaner to get your Registry back to its fighting weight.

Not so with smartphones. On Friday, I eased the Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro from its box, turned it on, and was greeted with a message urging me to set up McAfee WaveSecure before I’d even set up the phone with my Google account.

Delving into the app drawer revealed more unwanted software, with a host of apps neatly summarising Android’s perennial fragmentation issues: alongside the official Market, the Xperia Mini Pro comes loaded with four different app stores. There’s also other McAfee apps installed as well as a Popcap Games trial and a selection of media management tools.

It’s not restricted to Sony Ericsson handsets, either. HTC’s often held up as the paragon of Android quality — alongside Samsung — but my own Desire HD is riddled with stuff that I simply don’t want: 3Mobile-TV, 3Musik and Planet3 were all installed alongside third-party apps such as Amazon MP3, Bebo, Bejeweled Deluxe and a demo of EA’s Sims 3.

Who’s responsible? Networks, largely, which receive clean handsets and then load them up with rubbish after signing deals with numerous partners. And it’s not like you can just get rid of this software, either — most of it’s there to stay, with hard-coded blocks in place to ensure you don’t uninstall any of the tat you don’t want.

There are ways around it, with rooting a possibility if you’d like an untarnished Android experience. Personally, I use a superb app called LauncherPro to kill two birds with one stone: it replaces HTC Sense with its own customisable home screen, and it also allows you to hide apps in your app drawer — the next-best option if I can’t uninstall.

Vodafone’s actions prove that smartphone bloatware can go very wrong, but other companies don’t seem to be learning lessons. Instead, this greed continues, and comes at the expense of Android’s reputation and, more importantly, the tarnished experience that users will have with their new phones — after all, this sort of thing doesn’t happen on iOS.

It’s already made its stateside debut, but over in good ol’ Blighty Lenovo has finally shown off its latest business ultraportable, the 13.3in ThinkPad X1.

From the off, it’s an unmistakeably classic ThinkPad. A sea of smooth matte black – magnesium alloy top and bottom – stretches all around, interrupted only by the occasional flash of red. It’s seriously slim, too, measuring just 17mm thick and adding a claimed 1.7kg to your laptop bag.

All the ThinkPad hallmarks are in place. The trackpoint glares from the centre of a backlit Scrabble-tile keyboard whose concave keys have travel and feel in abundance. Even though the multitouch pad integrates the mouse buttons into its bottom edge, they too deliver a quality feel with every click.

Display-wise, we’re not convinced by the rumours that Lenovo were going to employ a premium IPS panel. With a fair amount of contrast shift evident in the its vertical viewing angles, this looks more like a decent TN to our eyes. Still, it’s good enough: it didn’t look to offer the natural colours of a Macbook Pro, but strong contrast puts it well ahead of the disappointing panel on Sony’s VAIO S Series. Brightness hits a claimed 350cd/m2 and cranking the ThinkPad X1’s display up to maximum was enough to make us believe that figure.

The decision to employ a layer of Gorilla Glass left us conflicted, however. While the extra resilience is welcome, the glossy reflective finish isn’t. Even under the fairly dim lighting of last night’s event, you can see the lights glaring back in the picture above. And the 1,366 x 768 pixel resolution? That’s downright disappointing – given a choice, we’d have the 1,440 x 900 resolution of the old X301 back in a flash.

Still, the toughened display is well in keeping with Lenovo’s design brief. At 1.7kg, there’s no question the X1 is a slightly chunky ultraportable, but it feels like one that’ll survive years, rather than months, on the road. A fingerprint reader and TPM 1.3 chip deliver the data security you’d expect from a proper business portable, and the hard-disk drop sensor and spill-proof keyboard (you can see the drain hole in the picture below) help guard against physical disasters.

Performance and connectivity sees the ThinkPad X1 play its trump cards. Sandy Bridge takes pride of place, and there’s no recourse to the low-voltage variants: it’s a 2.5GHz Core i5-2520M. Lenovo’s employed the full-fat Intel vPro chipset, too, with all of its remote manageability benefits. All the usual ports and connectors line up sensibly at the laptop’s rear - there’s an SD card reader, one USB 3 and one USB 2 port, eSATA, Mini-DisplayPort and HDMI - and Gigabit Ethernet, dual-band 802.11n and optional integrated 3G tick every networking box going.

Lenovo claims five hours of battery life from the lithium-ion cell, with the optional battery slice doubling that to the ten-hour mark. That’s a mite underwhelming, but with Lenovo’s RapidCharge battery technology charging each battery to 80% capacity in just 30 minutes, the X1 looks like it’ll have the chops to survive the longest working days.

While it is genuinely impressive to see how much Lenovo’s managed to pack into the X1, it comes at a price that’ll make a serious dent in anyone’s IT budget. Insight UK have the X1 on pre-order with a Core i5-2520M, 4GB RAM and 250GB hard drive for £1,226 inc VAT, and the top-end 160GB SSD and 8GB RAM model reaching £1,663 inc VAT. One thing’s for certain: with Sony’s similarly priced VAIO Z Series due for an imminent relaunch, and the ThinkPad X1 slated to start shipping in June, this isn’t going to be the only premium ultraportable vying for a piece of your IT spend in the upcoming months.

We’re looking to squeeze a final review unit out of our Lenovo contacts in the next couple of weeks, so keep your eyes peeled for the definitive PC Pro verdict.

If you’re looking to get shot of an old laptop, then you’re faced with a decision. You could advertise on eBay – if you can stomach the fees – or resort to the cheapskate’s site of choice, Gumtree. Alternatively, you could point your browser at www.webuyanylaptop.co.uk.

It’s gloriously simple. Use the web-based wizard to select the brand and model of the laptop in question, then enter details about its processor, RAM, hard disk and general condition. Once you’re happy with the offer, the company sends you a box, postage pre-paid, and in goes the laptop. Then all you have to do is wait for the cash to appear in your account.

So, how much do you think your laptop is worth? £40? £400? I’ll break it to you gently. Not much.

I tapped in the details for my trusty home laptop: a Sony Z Series with a now old-ish 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 6GB RAM and a 128GB SSD. It’s a laptop that was worth around £1,400 when it was new, and one that’s received extra RAM and an SSD upgrade over the past four years. We Buy Any Laptop offered me £83.

Undeterred, I imagined that I had a pristine Lenovo ThinkPad W701 workstation for sale – about £2,000 worth of hulking 17in desktop replacement. With an imaginary 640GB hard drive, 6GB of RAM and a wholly makebelieve Core i7 processor, it was sure to be worth more than my £83 of Sony laptop. Despite claiming that my theoretical Lenovo laptop was under a year old, and in excellent condition, I was offered the princely sum of £204.

Head on over to Webuyanylaptop and find out what your laptop’s worth. I’m willing to bet it’ll be just a smidgen less than you might have hoped.

I got an Amazon Kindle for Christmas. I charged it for only the third time yesterday, despite using it almost every day. In fact, my only problem with the Kindle is remembering where I left the charger several weeks ago.

Similarly, I can’t remember the last time I ran out of juice on my laptop. Until a couple of years ago, I could barely complete a train journey home without peering at the Windows battery meter and praying the laptop didn’t abruptly conk out mid-way through a match in Football Manager (I do work on the train sometimes, in case my publisher is reading).

Yet, with the extended battery pack on my Dell XPS M1330, the battery lasts about three or four hours – plenty long enough to get me to and from the office. And by today’s standards, that’s even starting to look pretty feeble. The 13in MacBook Pro lasted for in excess of 10 hours in our light-use battery tests, for example. Like the Kindle, it’s practically reached the point where you barely need to worry about the battery.

I wish I could say the same for my smartphone. I’m about to head up to the Lake District for a photography weekend with some of the PC Pro crew. I’ve charged my iPhone overnight, but with a Bluetooth connection to the satnav and a seven hour drive ahead of me, I’m genuinely concerned that the phone’s battery might not even last all the way to Cumbria. And the last thing you want on a long car journey is to worry about whether the phone will still be alive to call the AA if the exhaust falls off.

I love the iPhone, but part of me also longs for the day when I could sling my Nokia E71 in my pocket and know that I wouldn’t even need to take a charger away with me for the weekend, let alone before we even get to our destination.

So here’s a pledge for Apple, Nokia, HTC and all the other smartphone makers out there: make a modern smartphone that can ease my battery paranoia, and I’ll be the first in the queue for one when my current contract runs out in the summer.

After our exclusive reviews of Sony’s brand-new CA Series notebook and L Series touchscreen all-in-one, Sony’s launch event in London’s Century Club promised to be tinged with an overwhelming sense of deja-vu.

Our eyes soon lit up, however, as Sony unveiled its newly redesigned S Series. As the more affordable, albeit slightly less attractive, sibling to Sony’s mighty Z Series, the S Series was always one of our favourite business ultraportables. Now after a deft nip and tuck in Sony’s design department, the S has emerged transformed: slimmer, sexier, and appealing as much to lap-of-luxury consumers as upwardly mobile business users. In short, the S is ready to provide a Windows-powered alternative to Apple’s high-end MacBooks.

A rigorous weight-loss program sees the S Series now rise a mere 24mm off the desk, while tumbling the S Series in our hands was enough to believe the claimed weight of only 1.75kg — this is one notebook that’s light enough to carry around all-day long.

A new reinforced central hinge helps keep the notebook’s clean, crisp lines, and the exhaust vent nestles underneath, blowing hot air to the laptop’s rear.

And despite that lean, lithe figure, the S feels remarkably solid — both the millimetre-thick lid and angular hinge proved surprisingly resistant to our hands tugging it to and fro.

The new design carries over the excellent scrabble-tile keyboard we’re used to, and the wide channels between each key and light, crisp key action make for lovely typing. It’s now backlit, too.

The touchpad also feels great; the lightly textured feel and wide clicky buttons adding to the S Series’ luxurious high-end feel.

It comes as little surprise to find Intel’s new Sandy Bridge generation of processors taking centre stage on the specifications. Intel’s 2.3GHz Core i5-2410M is the CPU of choice — although Sony’s configure-to-order service will serve up some more affordable options — and with Turbo Boost 2.0 taking clockspeeds right up to 2.9GHz, the 64-bit copy of Windows 7 Professional felt positively silky-smooth. There was no word on whether Intel’s vPro platform would make a showing in final retail units, however.

Another first for the range is the addition of graphics switching, courtesy of Sony’s  Dynamic Hybrid Graphic System. It’s not just a fancy new name for Nvidia’s Optimus, however, as Sony has partnered Intel’s on-chip HD Graphics 2000 with AMD’s Radeon HD 6470M. And as the S Series is graced with a manual graphics switch, swapping from discrete to integrated graphics requires nothing more than the flick of a finger.

Sony claims that the new graphics switching technology allows the S Series to last up to seven hours in Stamina mode (with Intel HD graphics engaged), but an optional battery slice is capable of pushing the notebook’s stamina well over the ten-hour mark.

Connectivity receives a relatively minor update — a single USB 3 port added to the two USB 2 ports — while dual-band 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.1 are complemented by the optional VAIO “everywair” 3G WWAN card. There are few other surprises: the Sony’s right-hand edge squeezing in those USB ports alongside D-SUB, HDMI and SD and Memory Stick card readers.

With a nod to the S Series’ new dual-personality, Sony is also planning to add Blu-ray as an optional extra sometime in the near future. Our contact couldn’t confirm whether the HDMI output was 1.4 compliant, however, so those hoping to hook the S Series up to their 3DTV will have to hold tight.

The S Series will be shipping in March with a starting price of around £999 inc VAT for the basic 3G-free model. Keep an eye on PC Pro’s website for an imminent review.

The truth of the matter is somewhat different, of course, and basic data security is neither difficult nor expensive to achieve. All it takes is a little bit of technical know-how and an awful lot of common sense.

One aspect of data security where common sense often gets thrown out of the window is that of physical theft. Sure, there is an argument that as long as your data is properly encrypted it matters not a jot if the bad guys access your hardware, steal your laptop or find your USB stick.

It’s an argument that holds a fair amount of water, and I’m the first to advocate an ‘encrypt everything’ approach to data, but safeguarding your hardware against physical theft is so obvious that I’m always amazed to discover so many small businesses doing no such thing.

I’m the first to advocate an ‘encrypt everything’ approach to data, but safeguarding your hardware against physical theft is so obvious

Many will say that they already pay hefty insurance premiums, and if the old laptop is stolen then it’s a good opportunity to upgrade with the claim money. But what if all your data wasn’t properly encrypted, what about the interruption to your business continuity (even if it’s only a matter of an hour or two while a current backup image is squirted onto a spare machine) and what about the notion that not becoming a crime statistic is actually a good thing?

The bottom line is that taking any risk with your data is a bad thing and ensuring that your hardware is protected from theft or loss to the best of your ability is a no-brainer. The Absolute Theft Recovery team monitors laptop thefts, and has compiled a top ten list of the most common places where hardware is stolen from, after analysing the details of thousands of reported thefts during 2010. I was somewhat surprised that most thefts of laptops occurred from school, but have to imagine that’s because Absolute do a lot of business monitoring hardware in the education sector.

It came as no surprise at all that the home and the car made up the rest of the top three, with work following close behind at number four. Hotels, restaurants, public transport including taxi cabs, and airports were also common venues for computer crime.

So what can your small business do to prevent becoming part of the statistics? Actually, quite a lot and most of them are low cost and easy to implement.

Physical locks

Take the straightforward, if rather retro sounding, matter of making use of the Kensington lock slot and looping a decent quality cable around an immovable object to secure your laptop against casual theft in your office? Please note that the leg of a chair or desk is not an immovable object, and a five quid cable that can be cut using a pair of nail clippers isn’t decent quality. Cables are fine for protecting against opportunistic thefts during office hours, but if laptops are left in the office overnight then you should consider investing in a made-for purpose lockbox or secure storage cabinet and suitable alarm systems.

Also, when it comes to in-situ hardware, a cable will not stop the determined thief equipped with a pair of bolt cutters. The good news is that such thefts seem to be on a downwards spiral. While I have no official figures to support this claim, I’ve not been reading about so many hardware thefts as I used to and the business grapevine would suggest that offices are not being targeted as much as they used to be.

I suspect that the falling price of memory has a lot to do with the apparent decline in such crimes, as ripping a machine open and stripping it of RAM to sell down the pub or on eBay used to be high on the agenda of a petty thief. Couple that with a general decline in desktop computing and the ready availability of cheap netbooks, and it’s hardly surprising that demand for knock-off RAM and second-hand machines has fallen like a lead balloon.

Mobile alarms

Opportunist and professional thieves would appear to favour the mobile hardware market these days, and that means laptops, netbooks and smartphones. So how should you go about protecting these from the bad guys and moments of stupidity when things get lost? The latter is, actually, a much harder proposition that the former. Losing things is a fact of life, although losing a lappy can often be a rather expensive one in terms of both the hardware cost and the interruption to your working day and beyond.

Attach a transmitter to your laptop and keep the receiver in your pocket; if the two should be separated by more than the preset couple of metres or so an alarm will sound to remind you

You can buy alarms which work on a proximity principal, such as the Zomm reviewed in this month’s issue of PC Pro. Attach a transmitter to your laptop and keep the receiver in your pocket; if the two should be separated by more than the preset couple of metres or so an alarm will sound to remind you (and everyone in the vicinity) that you’re stupid.

At the low end of the budget scale such devices provide a simple method of preventing both the accidental loss of laptops at airports and train stations, for example, as well as opportunistic theft. For the one-man band business they make a lot of sense, but slightly bigger concerns might want a slightly more complex and costly solution such as a lojack service.

These use a software agent embedded in the BIOS firmware that maintains contact with a service centre, either via GPS or Wi-Fi depending upon your hardware, and allows the laptop to be located if lost or stolen. Lojack services are also useful in that they can keep a log of all activity after the theft was reported and remotely block access to your data, or even delete it if you prefer.

A similar service can be had for free if you happen to have an iPhone, using the Apple MobileMe service and an app called Find My iPhone. Once installed, you can locate your missing iPhone from any web browser and have a custom message pushed to the home screen and lock screen, together with an alarm sound. An email is sent to let you know that the message has been pushed to the handset, and another provides a date and timestamp when that message has been viewed on the iPhone itself. You can also remotely lock the iPhone or wipe all data, and the precise location of the device is displayed via Google Maps.

Laptop anti-theft measures

Don’t leave your laptop in the car. If you absolutely must, make sure it’s locked in the boot, preferably securely with either the Kensington lock slot and a cable, or within a specially installed car safe. Of course, if your car gets stolen then so does your laptop.

Don’t spend a fortune on a designer laptop bag, or use the branded one that was supplied with the laptop. These simply serve to identify you as a potentially valuable target. Instead, use a cheap and above all else non-descript bag instead.

Stick like glue to your laptop. If you are holding it then the only way a thief will get it is if they mug you. If you leave it unattended on your desk, in a conference room, the floor of an airport lounge, on the seat next to you on a train, things become a lot easier especially for the opportunist thief.

Consider marking your equipment to make it both easier to identify and harder to sell. So-called invisible marking systems such as ’smartwater’ forensic liquid will leave a unique chemical fingerprint on your hardware that is all but impossible to remove, but easily viewed by the police using specialist equipment.

At the opposite end of the marking scale, hugely visible customisation (think business logos and slogans, impossible to remove identification tags and the like) which will help to prevent a casual thief from making an easy sale and a quick buck from your loss.

Samsung’s laptop division have two things to boast about at this year’s CES: the elegant sliding tablet TX100 and equally elegant ZX310.

Make no mistake, this is a beautiful laptop. The whole chassis is made from a metal called duralumin, which Samsung claims is “twice as strong as aluminium”. It certainly felt tough in the hand, but perhaps more importantly for the ZX310’s target buyer it looks rather nice too.

The only problem you’ll find is fingerprints. Not only because the ZX310 is glossy but also because people will want to reach out and touch it.

As the photo above shows – courtesy of Samsung rather than taken by me on the show floor, as you may be able to guess – it’s also thin. At a claimed 16.3mm it beats the new-look Apple MacBook Air 13in by 0.7mm, although it’s not clear whether Samsung’s stated depth includes the feet or not.

The 13in screen packs a punch too. Samsung claims a 400nits brightness rating; most laptops top out at around 250nits. It looked striking on the show floor, which is quite an achievement under all the lighting.

Samsung is pricing the ZX310 at the sort of level you’d expect for a premium, ultra-thin laptop that has the MacBook Air in its sights: I was told to expect £1,399 inc VAT when it arrives in March, which is likely to be about £100 cheaper than the equivalently priced Air.

Exact specifications aren’t clear yet, but the ZX310 uses the latest low-voltage Core i5/i7 processors and a solid state drive. This, Samsung claims, means the ZX310 can boot up in under 12 seconds.

If anyone’s wondering what to buy me for next Christmas, make a note now.

It sounds terrible, especially given that the money comes from the public via the licence fee, but when, or if, you stop to think about it – that actually represents less one and a half laptops a week.

Careless? Yes, but hardly a big surprise given that the Beeb employs 23,000 members of staff, often on the move and working unconventional hours. OK, they don’t all carry laptops or other portable devices, but it’s fair to assume that a good chunk of them have a laptop and at least a BlackBerry.

To put that in perspective, the British Computer Society compiled figures three years ago looking to benchmark the normal level of laptop loss and theft among companies. It found that laptop loss ranged between 20 and 40 machines per thousand in a year.

Even at the bottom end of that estimate, and assuming only 5,000 BBC staff carry a laptop, that would equate to 200 in two years, which is well below what the BBC is being castigated for in reports. In fact, I’ve personally lost almost as many pieces of hardware on various late-night commutes and taxi-rides.

Now I’m no apologist for BBC staffers treating their publicly-funded hardware with reckless abandon, but there is a case for putting this story in a hall of fame for gratuitous product plugging by street-savvy PR shenanigans

The revelations came out after a Freedom of Information Act request, not from a journalist or newspaper, but from a software security company, Absolute Software, which (wait for it) sells a security service for tracking down laptops when they have been stolen.

The company, in a press release issued earlier today, took the BBC to task over the fact that only 19 pieces of the lost hardware had been recovered by the corporation, although the BBC said 15 laptops, three mobiles and one BlackBerry were recovered and that whenever a suspected theft or loss was reported, “data security breach procedures” were invoked as necessary.

“It’s arguable whether BBC laptops are in fact ‘appropriately’ protected – the sheer number of devices that were lost or stolen and not recovered would suggest the opposite,” said Absolute Software’s Dave Everitt . “The BBC would do well to ensure they are using the technology that’s already installed in most laptops to track such stolen devices as well as smartphones and recover them, or at least render them impossible for others to use.“

Fine sentiments no doubt, but if I was running the security side of a corporate mobile strategy I’d be super cautious of a company that would run so quickly to the media, and trade so ruthlessly and publicly on the misfortune of another organisation that probably isn’t performing any worse than the industry average.

Quite how the BBC is paying so much for its laptops – £1,500 a piece, according to the research – is another matter altogether.

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.