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.

Fortunately, not all cameras were banned: as you can already tell, we were accompanied by a camera-toting Sony employee who I persistently annoyed by asking to “take a picture of this”. “Oh, and that”. “And could you take one of those too, please?” I think she may have said something rude about me in Japanese at one point.

But, just like all tech junkies, my excuse is that I was excited by all the cutting-edge technology on show. Even if the very first thing they showed us was this:

As can be seen from the diagram at the top of the leftmost poster, the facility consists of around a dozen different rooms (not all of which we were privy to), but what I didn’t previously realise is just how many regulation tests laptops have to pass – the chart on the right shows over 40, of which CE, the standard we’re most used to seeing, is just one.

But, on to the geeky stuff. Around the corner lurks an anechoic chamber guarded by a door of such ruggedness even Mr T wouldn’t be able to bust it down.

And behind the door…

This is where Sony tests for electromagnetic radiation so we can safely position laptops on our lap tops without fearing for our fertility. But it’s not just about ticking boxes. We were also shown Sony’s newest testing chamber, where every single piece of foam you see below cost over 1,000 euros. The room as a whole, complete with testing machinery, cost over 1 million euros.

While I can’t show a photo of inside the chamber (it contained an as-yet unannounced product, which will be revealed on 10 May along with a review on this very site) I can reveal the output of the results:

That rather splendid-looking ball of fire shows the strength and evenness of the Wi-Fi reception, allowing Sony’s engineers to tweak the position of the antennae to best effect.

But the next part of the tour was probably the best. The ruggedness testing.

That isn’t, as you may be thinking, a badly taken photo: it’s the sight of a VAIO X Series being dropped from 90cm onto a block of concrete. And yes, naturally, it survived the test. If you want to see it in action as a video, here’s one of Sony’s official drop test videos:

Hiding away at the back of the same room was an innocent-looking transparent box with a silver VAIO lurking inside. Innocent, that is, until you pressed a button, at which point a whirling wind started blowing dust particles at an insane speed.

“We tried to think of the worst possible conditions,” said our guide, “and this is like when you unfurl a dusty blanket and all the dust blows everywhere.”

And then on to the final area, or at least the final area we were allowed to look at.

It may look kind of pristine and cool, but step inside this chamber (as I did around ten seconds after the photo above was taken) and a wave of heat and humidity whacks you square between the chest. When we visited, the temperature was a “mere” 35°C with a 90% humidity. But this machine can go up and down in temperature at whim, stretching from -20°C to +40°C.

The next day we caught a bullet train back to Tokyo; it wasn’t anywhere near as exciting.

Let’s get the facts out of the way first. This is the world’s lightest ever laptop, weighing less even than the Sony VAIO P-Series – and that weighed in at 640g.

Hold the X-Series in your hands and it feels breathtakingly light. Once you pick it up, you don’t want to put it down.

It’s also thin: just 14mm at its thickest point. Position the screen side-on and you can barely see it. In fact, Sony has had to fit retractable feet simply to give enough room for the Ethernet port.

The screen itself is an LED affair and measures 11.1in diagonally across. We expected there to be a sacrifice in terms of image quality, but under the hall lights it appeared bright and sharp.

Inevitably the keyboard doesn’t have much give. There’s barely more than a millimetre in travel, which makes it feel like you’re typing on rock.

Despite this, we found it easy to hammer out a few sentences in quick time – the only problem being the German keyboard on our test sample.

It’s early days for the X-Series, so we’ve no confirmation on pricing or specification. At this point, Sony wouldn’t even confirm which processor family would be inside.

Nevertheless, as a feat of engineering – and as a halo-effect product to sit at the top of the VAIO range – the X-Series already looks like it’s going to be a classic.

UPDATE Further to this hands-on, I had the opportunity to speak to a VAIO “specialist” within Sony and can confirm that the X-Series will come with either a 128GB or 256GB solid-state drive inside, but the processor has yet to be confirmed.

The screen will be 1,366 x 768. As can be seen from the photos above, it’s incredibly slim, which is the reason why Sony reinforced the carbon fibre usually used for such lids with extra layers of plastic (the rest of chassis is made from carbon fibre alone). This adds rigidity without adding too much weight, and Sony claims the X-Series’ lid can withstand 150kg of pressure .

The price, I’ve been assured, won’t be more than 2,000 euros. Sony hopes to produce a model at around the 1,500 euro mark.

It also looks like the X-Series will go on sale at the end of October to tie in with the launch of Windows 7 – and Sony has confirmed that the OS of choice will be Windows 7 Professional.

Perhaps most impressive of all, the Sony spokesperson I spoke to – who’s been using a sample of the VAIO X-Series for the past two months – claims that he gets around five hours of use from the slim, six-cell battery that is likely to come as standard.

Sony will also be selling an incredible 18-cell battery to slot onto the underside of the X-Series, and it aims to get between 18 and 20 hours of life from this.