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

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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There were 2 impressive announcements from Sony at the press event last week, and without a doubt the biggest one they are trying to push is the range of 3D Bravia’s due for release next year.

The press conference included some example footage of the 3D used in the Bravia’s and it will be using RealD 3D technology which is the type of 3d that uses polarized images to and the sunglasses style glasses.

The footage they played included a clip from the movie Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, some 3D gaming footage of Wipeout, some nature footage and some footage of a Football game.

The Sony booth also included some TVs running the above footage.

Personally my experience was a bit hit and miss with it. I thought the football was poor however the movie, Wipeout and the nature footage were good.

Personally I am not totally sold on the 3D at home idea, I think 3D technology has some way to go before I would consider it. I don’t think it is an of the TV’s though, more a lack of quality content that shows off the 3D technology properly. I wish they had show some footage of Avatar instead of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, I think that may of change my perception of the 3D tech quite a bit.

Ok I thought I may as well get this out of the way first. One of the main points of Sir Howard Stringer’s (CEO and President of Sony) talk was the announcement of make.believe (Make Dot Believe) which is Sony’s new group wide brand message.

All I can say about this is what a load of crap! What annoys me the most about this is that they have made a big fuss over it and probably spent a small fortune coming up with it even though I doubt it will make any difference to the end consumer.

I would of thought spending that marketing budget on fixing some of the flaws in the X Series Walkman such as the diabolical web browser they used on it.

I am no marketing guru but I just can not see how this could help raise awareness for Sony products?

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Sony Press Conference at the IFA in Berlin. Over the next few posts I will be posting some of the highlights of the event (both good and bad).

Unfortunately I was unable to attend the entire event due to other commitments, so my time there was restricted to the Sony Booth.

I would also like to thank Sony and Immediate Future for their hospitality.

With its first spotting at CES earlier in the year and with IFA fast approaching, LG will be giving a full showing of its new monster sized OLED, just kidding its still the biggest out there due to the fact all that’s currently out there is the Sony XEL-1, but at 15” a full 4” bigger than the Sony, OLED screens are going to be entering respectable size.

As well as the extra inches, the TV gives a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio a super fast response rate, being OLED the power consumption is a lot less than a standard LCD and the screen life will be guaranteed for 30,000 hours of use.

There’s no news on an exact price yet but its likely to be sky high if the Sony one is anything to go by. Hopefully we’ll get some more info from IFA in Berlin. It will be hitting the Korean market in November and hopefully will be on our shores early next year.