Sony VAIO PCG-X505/P

Have a quick flick through the Sony catalogue and you'll find all sorts of remarkable inventions, from quirky space-age robots through to Walkmans and PlayStations. This is a company that's not afraid to innovate, live on the edge and in many cases redefine an entire industry. Take ultra-portable notebooks. We can almost certainly thank Sony for making them so small and sexy, and the company has just unleashed the gorgeous VAIO PCG-X505/P to hammer the point home.

This notebook isn't just thin, it's positively skeletal. Measuring only 11mm at the front and weighing just over 800g, you have to ask yourself quite how Sony managed to build a notebook so small. And the answer is simple - by designing nearly all of it from the ground up.

The keyboard, for example, needed an entirely fresh way of thinking to squeeze it inside such a small chassis. Sharp had to take a similar approach with the Muramasa's keyboard, which sank into the body as you closed the lid (see issue 91, p100), but Sony's design gurus have excelled themselves with the X505's almost calculator-esque keyboard with its flat square plastic keys.

There's no questioning that it takes a bit of getting used to, but it's still surprisingly ergonomic to type on after just a few minutes. The keys have a satisfying click, and, with the exception of the spacebar, they're all large enough to make sure you're typing quickly and accurately. What's more, the keyboard is at the front, which makes it ideal for typing on your lap without getting any wrist cramp. It's not quite so comfortable, however, when it's on a desk as you can't use your lap as a naturally soft palmrest.

But even this keyboard design doesn't leave much room for the rest of the components. In fact, it really just leaves the modest area above the keyboard, and somehow Sony has accommodated a hard disk and a full-size Type II PC Card slot in there too. If you think about it, this only leaves a playing card-sized space for the motherboard, processor and memory, but Sony has squeezed them all in.

The only downside with all this, of course, is expansion. The 512MB of PC2100 memory is hardwired to the motherboard, there are no SODIMM slots, and the number of ports is pretty limited too. There are only two USB 2 ports and a four-pin FireWire port on the left, with the VGA and Ethernet sockets coming on an extra dongle. You don't get a modem, infrared or Bluetooth either, although the supplied 802.11g WLAN PC Card will mean you can show off the X505 at your local wireless hotspot.

But, these points aside, the current spec is quite adequate for running Windows XP and anything else you'd use an ultra portable for. By this we mean office work, web browsing and maybe listening to music or watching a DVD with the supplied external combo drive. Be warned, though, that if you want a full-on PC in an ultra portable box, then the X505 isn't it. The overall 2D benchmark score of 0.59 is woeful by today's standards, and the machine fared particularly badly in the video and MP3-encoding parts of our benchmark.

Similarly, the integrated Intel Extreme graphics chip will run screaming into the woods if you run just about any 3D games from this year or last. But these aren't the things you buy an ultra portable for, and in general use the X505 is fine. Besides, Sony could have easily used a slower Transmeta Crusoe instead, and the final model will come kitted with a slightly quicker 1.1GHz Pentium M and an external multicard reader too.