Mighty Gadget Blog: The latest technology news & reviews in the UK

Although officially not released by Sony yet, Tesco had put up a new Sony Vaio M Netbook for sale for just under £300 but now it appears to have been removed from the site probably due to the fact Sony are keeping quiet about its official release, oops.

A nice little black number the Sony Vaio M if pricing is true will be the cheapest Vaio we’ve seen to date and if you’re looking for a netbook this offers some pretty decent spec and the obvious recognition of quality Sony craftmanship. Inside the 10.1” Netbook will be Intel’s latest Atom chipset the N450(an improvement in speed and power consumption) powering a 250GB HDD, 1GB RAM and Windows 7 Starter Edition.

As said Sony haven’t confirmed it for sure and are still staying coy about it and although it appeared on Tesco the other day, I’m struggling to find it now but surely it won’t be long till it’s in officialdom.

Apple iPad maybe stealing all the headlines as usual but let us just remember there are other tablets out there worthy of getting a shout, Apple isn’t the be all and end all when it comes to tech. I’ve had an Archos 605 for the past 18 months and it still gets used regularly, they make a mean gadget.

Anyway last week the specs on the soon-to-be Archos 7 Android tablet got the leak. If the recent Archos 5 wasn’t quite enough for you then the 7 is it’s big brother. With a 7” 800 x 480 screen what makes Archos greater than an iPod touch or maybe the new iPad is the sheer amount of filetypes it plays is much greater. MP4, WMV, AVI, and FLAC. Plus one up already is the ability to download FLV(thats flash to you and me) files and playback those too.(see image for Full Specs)

The Date has been set for the end of March(iPad release ouch!!!)  but should be priced at a very reasonable £150.

click on for the full specs!!

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The highly anticipated VAIO X Series is the world’s lightest notebook at just 655g, and measures 13.9mm thin, has a 11.1” X-black widescreen LCD and up to 16 hours of battery life.

It will also cost an arm and a leg at $1,499 (£933) and will ship with an SSD drive and Windows 7 Home Premium.

No word on what CPU it uses yet but at that price it better had be one of Intel's new ULV CPUs.

Below is an interesting image from Sony showing the innards of the X Series.

AMD has announced the Tigris laptop platform which will become AMD's "mainstream" platform capable of full 1080p, DirectX 10.1 support and offloading video encoding to the Radeon HD 4200 GPU. The CPU is the new 45nm dual core Caspian CPUs, with speeds ranging up to 2.6GHz which should make for quite a powerful little netbook. Unfortunately though the battery life is only rated at 1 Hour 55 Minutes of active use.

Congo will offer the same HD video and DX10.1 support but use the slightly less powerful HD 3200 and dual core Neo chips inside meaning that you will get two hours 26 minutes of computer use.

At the very end of the press conference Fujio Nishida announced the new Sony Vaio X netbook. He was very vague about specific details but the Vaio X is a gorgeous 14mm thick, sub 700g, carbon fibre netbook.

At the moment specifications are very thin on the ground but a fellow blogger (sorry I didn’t get his name!) commented on it being the new Pineview N450 CPU and 2GB of Ram.

I managed to play with it for a few minutes and I found it very responsive, granted there wasn't really very much installed on the machine so there was not much to slow it down but initial impressions are very good.

There is no word on pricing but I am hoping it will be somewhere between the Vaio P pricing and a traditional netbook like the Mini 9. If it was £400-500 I could be very tempted with one of these but I think that maybe wishful thinking!

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Nokia have left entering the netbook market for some time but here’s their first foray into the market with what they prefer to call a “mini laptop”. The Finn’s netbook(should I call it that??) appears to have the specs of a high end netbook but offers a lot more. You wouldnt expect anything less from Nokia though would we.

• The first advantage is this Netbook is made by a “Mobile” company. Nokia knows what people want/need on the move which computer specialists Dell and Acer still havent seemed to get 100% right.
• Most netbooks don’t do HD graphics on their small screens, THIS DOES!!!! 720p – No problemo
• Nokia Claims its battery will last 12 hours. Now I know some of their phones batteries last forever but in my experience some havent so i’ll reserver judgement on this comment till I see one.
• The Nokia netbook no doubt will come bundled with a 3G broadband subscription but it has a SIM slot allowing you to put your phone SIM in to continue surging if your 3G broadband has no signal.
• Nokia have bundled GPS into the Booket 3G, no need to upgrade like other netbooks. Add Nokia Ovi Maps to the equation and you can find your way around like on your mobile.
• It works with all of Nokias online services (Ovi etc)
• Only 2cm thick, but built by Nokia. We all know you can drop your Nokia in the toilet(not recommended in reality) and after a dry out they work. No doubt the 3G booklet will be built of the same solid stuff. Its got an aluminium chassis and a thin Glass Screen frame, just like the MacBook, so it’ll look real nice too
• Nokia have said it’ll sync with your mobile too although full details on how or what it’ll do entirely arent sure but it can only be good …….right??
• It has HDMI out.  Plug into your TV and watch your HD video…….Simples!!

China’s InfoTimes is reporting via Foxconn(the makers of the iPhone) that Apple will be releasing a Netbook. Its reported to have a 9.7” touchscreen and you should be able to pick one up for $800 in the U.S. What price that would mean for the UK remains to be seen but personally, I can’t see it being more than £800.

This is a surprise really after Steve Jobs slated netbooks and said "As best as we can tell, there's not a lot of them being sold." So why the turn round especially when we also said "one of our entrants into that category if you will is the iPhone, for browsing the internet, and doing email and all the other things that a netbook lets you do".

All this is just strong rumours at the moment so we wont know the full details unless its announced. The main questions whats powerin it and what OS is it running. Will it be good enough for Snow Leopard or will it run an iPhone 3.0 style OS? Who knows?

Michael Arrington, the founder of Silicon Valley blog network TechCrunch has created a touchscreen web tablet called the CrunchPad which according to the New York Times could be released as early as this month.

With a 12-inch touchscreen and only 16mm thick, the CrunchPad promises to give us super fast internet access through its simple browser only OS. The browser will let you do all types of surfing, web based email and with Flash support all your YouTube needs. Its not fully known what powers the CrunchPad yet but it’s believed, like most netbooks will be Atom processor powered.

It is expected to retail in the States for $300 or £190 in the UK.