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Sony's budget-friendly VAIO VGN-NR160E laptop gets reviewed
Sony sure got the price right with its new NR Series VAIO laptops, and the folks at Laptop Magazine seem to think the company got quite a bit else right as well, with them bestowing their Editors' Choice award on the VGN-NR160E model. Winning the laptop the most favors is, of course, its $829 price tag, which buys you a 15.4-inch WXGA display, a 1.5GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 160GB 5,400 rpm SATA hard drive. They were also especially impressed by the laptop's battery, which lasted 2 hours and 19 minutes in their DVD rundown test and a full 3 hours and 41 minutes during their general productivity test. On the downside, all the "crapware" pre-loaded on the laptop resulted in a drag in performance (removing it boosted the PCMark05 score by 139 points), and they were also somewhat disappointed by the laptop's lack of 802.11n capability. That only proved to be enough to knock a half a star off the five star rating, however, which would seem to make this laptop a fairly solid bet for anyone looking to keep things under the $1,000 mark.
Sony's new NR-series laptops get a price, release date
Those shiny new VAIO NRs we told you about a couple of weeks ago have gotten the US nod and a price tag, and we thought we'd share the good news. The model, which Sony is referring to as "entry-level," touts a 15.4-inch, XBRITE-ECO display, a Core 2 Duo CPU, and all the regular bells and whistles, like 802.11a/b/g, DVD-RW, and an ExpressCard slot. The new laptop comes in a "fabric-like" casing, is available in three "stylish" colors (wenge, silk, and granite), and will be selling next month for the surprisingly low price (at least for Sony) of $750.
