But I’ve got terrible news for all those companies: there is only one Apple. Tempting as it may be to start up your own ecosystem of apps and content, you need something truly compelling to make people sign up to it in the same way that tens of millions of people have signed their lives away to Apple.

Apple customers sign up to a brand with values they believe in, to a name that they will be happy to associate themselves with.

For a start, you need trust. Apple customers sign up to a brand with values they believe in, to a name that they will be happy to associate themselves with. You also need staggering amounts of content: from apps to movies to TV shows to music, Apple has this sewn up.

You need sexiness: if I’m going to buy your phone, it needs to look damn good. Finally, you need phenomenal ease of use. If you have to spend a minute explaining what your service does, or how you connect to it using your devices, then you’ve lost three-quarters of your potential customers.

Like them or loathe them, no other company can match Apple in these areas.

So when I look back at CES, despite all the excellent technology on show, I do so with a mix of fear and despondency.

The issue is typified by the likes of Samsung and Sony. Both made big plays at CES that suggest they think they could be an all-encompassing rival to Apple, whether it’s Samsung talking about the fact you can play Angry Birds on their TVs or Sony pointing out that its customers can watch movies a month earlier on their movie-download service. Sorry Sony, sorry Samsung: but it’s not enough.

Instead, we need either open standards or a compelling play by a company that can work with different partners. Obvious examples of the latter are Microsoft and Google, but even this has hints of idealism: think how difficult Microsoft has found it to make anyone else sign up to services such as Passport.

Nevertheless, I can’t see any alternative. Sony and Samsung both produce great hardware, and Sony – through its subsidiaries such as Sony Entertainment – own some phenomenal content. But they are light years away from the position where a critical mass of consumers sign up to the Sony or Samsung ecosystem in the same way that Apple customers do.

So, please, stop trying and start working with Google, Microsoft and Amazon to ensure that the products we buy from you work with all the different content providers. Focus on what your company is good at, not what Apple is good at.

The phone watch is an idea that just isn’t going away, with a different spin of the concept produced pretty much every year at CES. But this time, Sony assures us, it’s really going to happen and it’s really going to be fabulous.

The video above shows some of the obvious limitations: if you’ve only got a tiny surface area on which to drag your fingers then it’s difficult to fit too much information on at any one time, and it’s also tricky to hit a tiny 60 x 60 pixel area on something as inherently unstable as your wrist.

Nevertheless, it does kind of work, and it’s worth noting that this screen is multitouch-enabled: press two fingers and it will go back one step. And we’re also pleased to see that it won’t only work with Sony phones (if you missed the news, Sony Ericsson phones are no more, having been sucked into Sony as a subsiduary); all you need is an Android phone with the appropriate app downloaded onto it.

Which leaves us with just one question: does anyone out there want one?

From iconic machines like the IBM PC to the silliness of Sony’s £1,190 netbook, we’ve scoured the darkest corners and blown dust off some of the oldest, oddest and rarest kit we can find – starting with a true icon of the industry.

IBM PC

Introduced on August 12 1981, IBM’s Personal Computer was the first machine to popularise the now-ubiquitous term – and one of these antiques sits at the back of the PC Pro Lab.

Processing grunt was provided by the single-core, 4.77MHz Intel 8088, and floppy disks and cassettes are both supported. There’s a mighty 256KB of RAM, with 64KB of that soldered onto the motherboard. The IBM PC didn’t come cheap, either: a barebones model without any drives cost $1,565 and the top-end model came with bells, whistles and a monitor for $20,000.

The motherboard includes five eight-bit Industry Standard Architecture slots, with three of ours occupied: there’s a floppy disk drive controller card a SixPakPlus memory expansion board packed with 64KB chips, and a multidisplay adapter that’s actually two slabs of PCB stuck together. In the middle of the machine is an IBM 5 ¼in Diskette Drive.

Only one question remains, though, once we’ve blown the dust off this venerable old machine – can it run Crysis?

Apple Macintosh Plus

The Macintosh Plus might be a disturbing shade of yellow but that’s hardly surprising – it first saw the light of day in 1986. Released for £2,599, it was produced until October 1990 – the longest production run of any Macintosh – and was supported by Mac OS up to 1996.

It broke ground in other ways, too. As the first Macintosh to include a SCSI port it paved the way for external devices such as hard disks, tape drives, printers and CD-ROM drives, and this was also the first Macintosh to use SIMMs for its memory – with a massive 1MB of the stuff included as standard across four 256KB sticks.

Our particular model bears the familiar Cupertino, California label on its rear, but the sticker also reveals that this machine was “Assembled in Ireland” – a far cry from today, where most technology seems to be produced in Asia.

Apple Macintosh Colour Classic

Fast forward a few years – and look under a different test-bench – and you’ll find another piece of Apple history. It’s the first compact Macintosh computer to come with a colour display, and we wouldn’t have the iMac – the world’s finest all-in-one PC – without the Colour Classic paving the way.

Originally priced at $1,400 in February 1993, it ran on Mac OS 7.6.1 – the first version of the OS to drop the “System” from its name so the more distinctive moniker could be trademarked and the OS licensed to third-party Macintosh manufacturers.

This ancient all-in-one was more upgradeable than most of today’s models, too. The Processor Direct Slot was used with the Apple IIe Card, and ran software designed for the older Apple II. This backwards compatibility was supposed to entice the education market to upgrade from Apple II machines to fully-fledged Macintoshes, but other upgrades were also available, from CPU accelerators to Ethernet and video cards.

This versatility means the Colour Classic enjoys a cult following today: users have modded the machine with Power Mac parts so its screen runs at 640 x 480 rather than 560 x 384, and others have fitted motherboards from more powerful models.

Casio Cassiopeia E-115

Technical editor Darien Graham-Smith found the Casio Cassiopeia E-115 hiding at the back of his cupboard, but it first arrived back in October 2000 when PDAs, rather than smartphones, were big news.

So, what did you get for £422? There’s the sturdy exterior, which we described as “dull-grey silver” and “resting on its laurels”, alongside a cradle that “feels cheap and doesn’t engage with the Cassiopeia as solidly as we’d like” in its full review.

It wasn’t all bad news, with a 240 x 320 LCD screen that was better than its rivals, and a 131MHz StrongARM processor that was “fast enough to ensure instantaneous contact searches and speedy application switching”, according to us. It also had 16MB of ROM and 32MB of RAM memory – “about as much as you currently need”, at least back then.

Oh, and the software? Microsoft Windows CE 3.0 PocketPC Edition. Our model is old and, presumably, scarred by Darien’s cupboard, so it wouldn’t turn on – although that’s probably for the best, given that we concluded that the Casio simply couldn’t “match the standard” set by Compaq’s iPAQ.

Apple iMac G4

The G4 marked the first major redesign of the iMac, but the forlorn model found in the PC Pro Lab has clearly seen better days. It’s missing its monitor bezel, the distinctive round base is looking grubby, and it wouldn’t turn on – although that chrome, cantilevered arm is as smooth as it was when the G4 was eased from its box in 2002.

We described the G4 as “smooth and elegant design that puts other computer makes to shame”. Even now it stands out in a sea of modern all-in-ones that all look a little too familiar.

Our review also highlighted Apple’s concentration on “excellent design and ease of use”, but that has downsides – a specification we described as “Paleolithic”. It’s the first time we’ve seen computers compared to dinosaurs, but the SDRAM was slow and the GeForce 2 MX graphics chip was a generation behind the curve. It might look nice – as Apple devices are wont to do – but PCs ran our Photoshop 7 benchmark almost twice as quickly.

Dell Latitude

The oldest laptop we managed to find demonstrates the changing of technology. This Dell Latitude isn’t quite as backward as we first thought. It’s either a C540 or C640 – we’re not sure which, as it’s been hidden on a high shelf for far too long – and it’s a mix of old problems and forgotten boons.

It’s running a Pentium 4 chip with Windows XP, but the most striking thing about this machine is its design – or lack of it. Plain plastic is the order of the day, and the lid features the familiar Dell logo, along with the kind of build quality that we’d slate if this machine were reviewed today.

The base doesn’t cover itself in glory, either, with stickers, flaps, screws, feet and even some exposed fans. It’s also obvious where laptops have fallen backwards as companies rush to build slim, snazzy Ultrabooks: we rarely see keyboards with the kind of comfort, responsiveness and travel as this Latitude offers, and the 4:3 screen has a native resolution of 1,600 x 1,200 – a huge amount of desktop real estate compared to the 1,366 x 768 and 1,600 x 900 screens that now seem to be the norm.

Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT, 7600 GS and AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT

We’ve a big plastic tub full of graphics cards in the Labs and, while most of them are recent, a trio of PCBs lurking amid the anti-static bags and DVI to D-SUB adapters come from decidedly older stock. Two Nvidia cards, the GeForce 7300 GT and 7600 GS, are joined by AMD’s Radeon HD 2600 XT.

They were launched in 2006 and 2007, and they handily illustrate the impressive speed at which technology is pushed forward. The first 28nm GPU has just arrived but, back then, Nvidia and AMD were using 90nm and 65nm processes – and the 390 million transistors in the AMD card pales when compared to the 4.3 billion in AMD’s latest.

The bandwidth statistics are telling, too: the Radeon card churns through 35.2GB/sec in its 512MB incarnation, with the 7300 GT and 7600 GS offering 10.67GB/sec and 12.8GB/sec respectively. The latest high-end card, the Radeon HD 7970, chews through 264GB/sec – and even modest boards, such as Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 550 Ti, handle 98.5GB/sec.

Oh, and our benchmarks? The 7600 GS played Call of Duty 2 at 18fps when run at 1,280 x 1,024. Bless.

Sony VAIO P-series

Sony senior vice president Mike Abary famously said his company would never join the “race to the bottom” when netbooks hit the big time, and he wasn’t joking – Sony’s VAIO P-series cost £1,190 inc VAT for the top-end model.

That money paid for radical design, with a base occupied entirely by the keyboard,  that’s still so small and fiddly that you have to peck at the keys, prod at the trackpoint and squint at the 8in 1,600 x 900 screen. The Z-series Atom was decidedly Z-list, too, thanks to performance that couldn’t match £350 rivals.

Fast forward, and I spot my first iPad: on the Tube, its user oblivious to the envious gawping of fellow travellers. For me, it had a similar effect, heralding the arrival of another exciting, innovative type of product.

That’s not the only parallel between netbooks and tablets but, as far as I can see, others aren’t nearly so positive. The netbook’s story has been a sad one: that initial flurry of excitement withered by staid products, precious little evolution and a stagnant market.

Look beneath the iPad – which is still a premium product – and the tablet market could suffer from many of the same problems.

The signs are already there: the market is flooded with a host of shoddy, near-identical products from established tech brands, no-name newcomers and bandwagon-riding outsiders, and innovation is hard to find.

Look under the hood of almost every tablet and you’ll find similar components, with cheaper models boasting obsolete hardware that’s not good enough to run Angry Birds, let alone the more demanding software currently being churned out by eager developers. Uninspiring design dominates the exterior, with cheap iPhone and iPad ripoffs dominating the market.

Almost all of them run Android and, in almost all cases, they disappoint the user with a litany of problems: build quality is often poor, screens are grainy or, even worse, made with unresponsive resistive technology. Plenty don’t have access to the Android Market, instead using an awful third-party store or making do without any legitimate way to install new software.

It’s a familiar story for those who’ve followed the netbook market: shoddy build quality and screens were found across dozens of devices, and a lack of hardware innovation meant they were also of limited use – and soon overshadowed by low-powered laptops.

There’s still hope for tablets. Apple’s forging its own wildly successful path but, away from iOS, only a handful of manufacturers, such as Sony and Samsung, are forging ahead with innovative products. Microsoft, meanwhile, is placing plenty of stock in Windows 8.

Will that be enough to help tablets avoid the same fate of netbooks? It’s still a growing market – tablets have just overtaken netbook sales for the first time – but there’s a big chance it could head in the wrong direction if more people buy, and are disappointed by, sub-standard products. Perhaps Sony exec Mike Abary was right back in 2008: a “race to the bottom” might seem tempting but, in the long run, it does more harm than good.

The announcement of the new Amazon Kindles caused all manner of excitement in the PC Pro office this week, until we realised Amazon actually had no plans to release the most exciting products in the UK. What a let-down. Still, that does at least give other manufacturers a chance to steal a march, and that appears to be exactly what Sony has done with its new Reader Wi-Fi, of which we have an early sample.

The first thing to notice when you pick up the Reader Wi-Fi is how light it is. It tipped our scales at just 162g, which makes the current Kindle look positively portly. With no keyboard it’s small enough to slip into an inside jacket pocket, and although it does feel a touch plasticky, it’s well made and the soft-touch plastic rear gives you a nice grippy surface to hold onto.

The screen is 6in across with a resolution of 600 x 800, and you get 1.4GB of usable memory expandable via a microSD slot, plus an infrared touchscreen just like the US-only Kindle Touch. This means you can sweep your finger right to left to turn a page, make handwritten notes and annotations with the supplied plastic stylus, and highlight text effortlessly (more on this later). For Sony, though, that’s nothing new. Where this device differs from its predecessors is in the inclusion of an 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter.

Once logged into your network using the onscreen keyboard, it offers direct access to the Sony ebook store, and through that a free subsection of Google Books, plus selected local libraries via the Overdrive eLibrary system. The latter provides time-limited DRM-based loans and, while the selection isn’t anywhere near as broad as the Kindle Store, the books are free.

Alas, the service isn’t yet up and running (and won’t be until the end of October), so we can’t pass judgement on its implementation in the device itself. We can only hope it rivals the gloriously simply system in the Kindle. But the good news is that you no longer need to rely on Sony’s Reader software to get content, which can only be a good thing.

The device’s onboard WebKit browser is fully functional and, in conjunction with the sensitive touchscreen, works surprisingly well. It’ll never rival a tablet for ease of use, but for accessing free ebook sites such as the Gutenberg Project, and even checking the odd email, it’s perfectly functional – and miles better than the Kindle’s browser. Even inertial scrolling and pinch-to-zoom operations function, although you may find the constant screen refresh sends you cross-eyed after a while.

Elsewhere, the Reader Wi-Fi exhibits similar strengths and weaknesses to previous Sony readers. It’s a superlative PDF-reading device. The multitouch capabilities of the screen mean even complex pages can be manipulated quickly and simply, and there are all manner of other ways of reading pages. You can set a custom crop to make pages with large borders more readable. In Navigate Page mode, the reader can be set to zoom right into the first column on a page, then follow the flow of text down then up and across when you hit the next button, instead of simply navigating to the following page.

Text can also be “reflowed” or stripped out so it fits the screen exactly. You can make handwritten annotations and highlight text for downloading via the Sony Reader software. A long press of the finger on a word, meanwhile, displays not only a dictionary definition at the bottom of the screen, but also pops up five buttons. These allow you to make a highlight the word, make a quick note and search the text, or carry out a keyword search in Google or Wikipedia.

And, although we can’t speak for the forthcoming Kindles, against the current model the Sony Reader Wi-Fi holds its own in terms of screen refresh speed and readability. Epub pages flip by in a single second, and as the screen uses the same E-Ink Pearl panel, contrast is largely the same as well. If anything the Kindle’s screen demonstrates a touch more contrast and crispness, but there’s very little in it. We took a macro photograph of each screen using identical lighting, shutter, aperture, ISO and white balance settings, then measured the black and “white” levels of each using Photoshop’s eyedropper tool. The result was a contrast ratio of 2.48:1 for the Kindle and 2.36:1 for the Sony.

The Sony Reader Wi-Fi is clearly a capable device; we can see that even without the benefit of being able to use the store on the device. It’s quick, readable and can handle PDF files in a much more intuitive and satisfactory way than the current Kindle – plus it’s incredibly light. The problem is with the price: at £130 we can’t see it competing with either current or future Kindles. We’ll have a full review when the services go live.

The hardware

The 372g Tablet P measures 26mm thick and 180mm long. That’s a bit chunkier than the latest breed of slip-thin phones, but the thick-set, curvy figure fits comfortably in the hand. And, while we’d struggle to squeeze it in our jeans pockets, it’s still far more pocketable than any of the current breed of Android 3.2 tablets.

Push the Tablet P flat, though, and the two 1,024 x 480 5.5in displays combine to form a 7in, 1,024 x 960 resolution display. Despite the several millimetres of bezel in between, it works well and ensures that navigating Android 3.2 never feels unduly cramped.

The Tablet P’s novel dual-screen design makes it possible to use it in a variety of ways. Set it on the desk like a miniature laptop, and while the top screen displays video, pictures or text, the bottom screen can assume a variety of roles. While playing a video or music, it displays playback controls, elsewhere offering a gallery view or an on-screen keyboard.

The design really comes to life once you fire up one of the included PS One titles. Where the Tablet S floats its gaming controls at the sides of the screen, the Tablet P relegates them to the lower screen, which feels far more natural; more like a traditional portable gaming device, such as Nintendo’s DS.

Sony’s Reader Store reveals another trick: tilt the Tablet P round so that you’re holding it like a book, and text flows down each screen to mimic individual pages. The narrow 480 pixel resolution of each screen leaves the pages looking a touch narrow, though, and we’ll be interested to see how it copes with diagram-filled textbooks and the like.

Swiping left or right smoothly scrolls from page to page, while highlighting text allows you to search through books or refer to Wikipedia for rapid reference. With the Reader Store reaching the UK at the end of October, it’s a feature that’ll live or die on the pricing and selection of books on offer.

Specifications

The Tablet P’s tiny body doesn’t leave much room for a battery, but Sony claims that the P will survive 120 hours in standby, and up to 6 hours of web browsing via WiFi.

And though the Tablet P shares the same Tegra 2 processor as the Tablet S, its standard specifications are a little different. There’s only one model (part code SGPT212) which comes with 3G, a rather stingy 4GB of onboard memory and a 2GB microSD card. Those looking to carry around heaps of music and movies will need to invest in larger microSD media.

Though the Tablet P’s novelty factor will have gadget fiends salivating, the pricing may dampen their enthusiasm: at £479, we can’t help thinking that Sony is being just a touch optimistic.

In among the expected crop of tablets, TVs, cameras and smartphones at IFA, Sony has unveiled its most stunningly bonkers product of all: the HMZ-T1 Personal 3D Viewer. Cramming two tiny 0.7in OLED screens into a headset that looks straight off the set of Star Trek, the HMZ-T1 delivers Full HD in three dimensions to an audience of just one.

If the photograph above suggests that these poor people are having a little trouble getting the device to fit just right, well, that’s because it’s a pretty bulky affair. With the visor extending so far in front of your face, the HMZ-T1 is unwieldy, even with the plastic headband properly fitted (see the chap at the far end of the row in the picture). The integrated headphones slide back and forth and rotate around, but we still had some trouble getting them just so on our, admittedly chunky, head.

Once you’ve got the HMZ-T1 on, you just have to adjust the focus sliders to bring the 3D image into crisp relief. A variety of video and audio options can also be adjusted in a heads-up display, with the directional keypad on the headset’s underside making it easy to navigate.

Once it’s configured, the image quality is staggeringly good: colours are rich and saturated, and the inky blacks of the OLED technology give images immense solidity. Once the picture snaps into focus, the sense of scale is unnerving: it feels like viewing a sizable 100in+ projection screen. The 3D effect is impressively free from any crosstalk artefacts, too. Even the compact headphones deliver fine sound quality.

But if you thought those active-shutter glasses for your 3D TV were expensive, we suspect the HMZ-T1’s use of OLED (that’s organic LED panels, if you were wondering) means we’re looking at a four (or even five?) figure sum. Funnily enough, Sony made no mention of pricing or a release date, so currently these 3D goggles are as elusive as they are crazy-looking.

UPDATE 2/09: It looks like our fears of massive four figure price-tags were unfounded. With our Sony contacts mentioning a suggested retail price in Japan that equates to nearer £800, the HMZ-T1’s aren’t quite as out there as you might expect.

So, if you’re sick of being forced to watch Eastenders with your other half (and you’d pay any price to squeeze in a quick round of Modern Warfare 2 while the missus isn’t looking), then maybe it’s time you got saving those pennies.

]]> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2011/09/01/sony-hmz-t1-personal-3d-viewer-review-first-look/feed/ 3 http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2011/09/01/sony-tablet-s-review-first-look/ http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2011/09/01/sony-tablet-s-review-first-look/#comments Thu, 01 Sep 2011 07:19:57 +0000 Sasha Muller http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/?p=41899 Amid a bevy of product announcements at Sony’s IFA 2011 stand, its brand new Android tablet, the 9.4in Tablet S, caught everyone’s attention. We fought through the crowds to get up close and personal with Sony’s new media darling.

The hardware

If you’re looking for novelty in the specification sheet, you’re likely to be disappointed. The 9.4in, 1,280 x 800 screen is powered by an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor and comes with Android 3.1 installed as standard – although it will eventually be upgradeable to 3.2.

Nevertheless, the screen itself looks bright, and even under the vicious glare of the Sony booth spotlights it positively oozed with contrast. If you can gauge speed from a few minutes spent flicking through menus, and idly pecking through a demo gallery of pictures and videos, the Tablet S feels as responsive as they come.

However, it’s the physical design that delivers the real departure from the exisiting crop of Android tablets. With a novel wedge-shaped design, the Tablet S tapers across its back from a thin edge to a thicker rounded profile. That extra girth makes the Tablet S more manageable than most in portrait mode; with more to grip onto, it actually feels far lighter than the claimed 598g weight would suggest.

Pop the Tablet S back on the desk, and that tapered figure also allows the display to tilt just that little bit forward. Thus, rather than forcing you to crane your neck to look from above, it’s quite usable from a sitting (or standing) position. In addition to making for easier typing, this makes it far easier to watch a video or read a webpage with the tablet flat on a desk.

If you crave an even more laptop-like tablet, the optional Sony docking cradle and Bluetooth keyboard will happily oblige. For tapping out longer emails, the wireless keyboard is the far comfier option – and a strip of Android navigation keys along the keyboard’s top edge save you from having to reach out and prod the display with aggravating regularity.

The software

Although Google’s Android 3.1 software is largely unmodified, Sony has added a few finishing touches of its own.

The first is the ability to use the Tablet S as a (very expensive) universal remote control, courtesy of an integrated infrared transmitter. Hundreds of TV brands and models are preconfigured, so most people will be able to just select their telly from the list and get channel-hopping right off the bat. If your TV isn’t listed, an IR receiver allows you to program the requisite codes using your old remote.

Another nifty party trick is the ability to ‘flick’ movies and music wirelessly to other devices. You don’t need a Sony TV for this: apparently it’ll work with any recent TV with up-to-date DLNA support, though we’re yet to see a definitive list of supported hardware. We tried and failed to get a decent video of the process (frankly we’re surprised it worked at all over IFA’s overloaded airwaves), but we saw plenty of demonstrations of it working.

It’s also possible to flick web pages and internet video over to the TV. Find a funny/horrible/interesting video on YouTube, and all you have to do is hit the shortcut button to fling it over to the TV set. The Tablet S then turns into a wireless touchpad/remote control, allowing you to continue surfing the web on the big screen.

The final attraction – perhaps the main one, depending on your priorities – is that the Tablet S (like its little brother, the Tablet P) boasts PlayStation certification. That means it’s possible to play downloadable PS One games, such as Crash Bandicoot:

The on-screen controls aren’t perfect: with default settings, we found the precision control required to avoid plunging Crash Bandicoot into every other crevasse nigh-on impossible. Thankfully, it’s possible to adjust both the position and size of the controls to suit your hands. As you’d expect from a game of this age, the graphics are basic, but the overall appearance is crisp and colourful, and framerates are silky smooth.

Whether Sony’s Tablet S would tempt us away from Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1, or indeed an iPad 2, is yet to be seen. With the basic 16GB Wi-Fi model coming in at £400 and available from the end of September, you’ll have to wait for the PC Pro review before we can give you the definitive answer.

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.

***We’ve now published our comprehensive review of Sony’s VAIO Z Series, so click here for the full lowdown *** Sony’s VAIO Z Series is one of the finest ultraportables to ever travel the Earth, but now, several years after its 2009 debut, Sony has ripped up the rulebook and started afresh. At a launch event in London, we caught our first up-close look at the all-new Z Series.

The hardware

After several generations of subtle tinkering – not least the addition of super-fast quad-SSD arrays in the most recent models – the new Z marks a quantum shift. Sony has pared the chassis down to an impossibly slim 16.65mm, and it now tips the scales at a barely-there 1.18kg. While it looks unhealthily slender, fear not: the carbon-fibre construction feels stiffer and stronger than you’d expect.

If you’re wondering quite how Sony managed to shave off those grams, the answer’s simple: the optical drive and dedicated AMD graphics chipset have been shifted into the external 685g Power Media Dock (pictured right).

Part docking station, part outboard graphics powerhouse, it uses Intel’s Light Peak technology to provide a high-speed link to the AMD Radeon HD 6650M graphics chipset inside. Just don’t call it ThunderBolt: as Sony’s utilised a tweaked USB 3 port to connect to the dock, it isn’t actually compatible with the products we’ll soon see for Apple’s port, and Sony told us not to expect any handy USB-to-ThunderBolt adaptors either.

Still, it’s a nice idea: in addition to the optical drive and graphics chipset, there are also VGA and HDMI 1.4 video outputs (which allows for up to three external displays at any one time), Gigabit Ethernet, twin USB 2 ports and a single USB 3 port.

While we couldn’t help but shed a tear at the loss of in-built discrete graphics, the VAIO Z promises, gram-for-gram, to remain the fastest ultraportable out there. Even the slowest model includes a 2.3Ghz Core i5-2410M processor, and it’s possible to upgrade to the dual-core 2.7Ghz Core i7-2620M. Battery life remains a critical question mark, but Sony claim up to seven hours from the internal lithium polymer battery; a figure doubled by the optional battery slice (seen clipped to the underside in the picture below).

The essentials

Drastic changes aside, the redesign hasn’t forgotten the essentials. The thin chassis means that the backlit Scrabble-tile keys have less travel than on previous models, but the spacious layout and crisp feel make for comfortable typing. The decision to integrate the buttons into the touchpad’s surface immediately set off alarm bells, but we didn’t notice any issues in our time with it. We’ll reserve final judgement until we get a full review unit.

Above the keyboard,  the VAIO Z’s 13.1in display is as great as ever. The matte finish minimises eye-straining glare, and with even the lower-specced VAIO Z boasting a generous 1,600 x 900 resolution, and a 1080p panel available as an optional upgrade,there are plenty enough pixels for proper multitasking. Viewing angles were also far better than those of the S Series.

Two USB ports (one USB 2, one USB 3) nestle alongside HDMI 1.4, Gigabit Ethernet and a single audio in/out minijack. With dual-band 802.11n, Bluetooth 2.1 and optional 3G covering the airwaves, the VAIO Z ticks pretty much every box going. And, even if you’re concerned about the Power Media Dock using up that solitary USB 3 connector (see the close-up to the right), the dock adds three USB ports of its own.

The price

In a word: expensive. In several: very, very expensive. Head over to Sony’s configure-to-order page and its possible to make even Platinum credit cards wilt under the load of a fully-laden VAIO Z .

Without a Power Media Dock, the base model clocks in at £1,454 inc VAT. That includes a Core i5-2410M, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD and a 1,600 x 900 screen.

Some of the upgrades are surprisingly affordable: a 1080p screen costs a reasonable £40; the battery slice, £60; a 3G modem, £100; a backlit keyboard, £15. Others, however, quickly push past the £2,000 mark. The basic Power Media Dock with DVD writer costs £400, while the Blu-ray writer-equipped version costs £525. Expanding the 128GB SSD to 256GB costs £410; pushing up to 512GB a stratospheric £1,130.

Throw caution to the wind, and a VAIO Z with all the trimmings costs a mere £3,634 inc VAT.

If you’re having trouble deciding whether to buy a car, a luxury holiday or a laptop with that four grand burning a hole in your pocket, the new VAIO Z’s likely to make your decision even harder. With the pre-production models at today’s event returning home for the finishing touches, Sony expects to have review units with us by the end of July. Until then, best get saving.