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Sony cuts the VAIO SA's starting price to $1,000, starts shipping the 15-inch VAIO SE
Lots of PC news flowing out of Sony Electronics' US headquarters this fine Sunday morning. First, the company slashed the starting price of the 13-inch VAIO SA laptop from $1,250 to $1,000, while the lower-end SB series now starts at $780 (it had been going for $800 after instant savings). We asked Sony's PR team what that means for folks who recently purchased either of these through Sony's online store, and still haven't gotten a response, but the company was quick to remind us that it's up to retailers such as Best Buy to set their own price protection policies. (Thanks, Sony!) Moving along, that 15.5-inch VAIO SE series we reviewed a month ago is at last up for sale, beautiful 1080p display and all. You can find her on Sony's site starting at a thousand bucks with a Core i5-2430M processor, 4GB of RAM, a 640GB 5,400RPM hard drive, DVD burner and, of course, that 1920 x 1080 panel. So, is all that worth a flaky trackpad and poor battery life (sans $150 slice)? That, friends, is a decision you'll have to make for yourself. Finally, in more granular news, the 14-inch C and E series are getting expanded Sandy Bridge processor options, while the 16-inch F series and L series all-in-ones will come with Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum, Sound Forge Audio Studio and ACID Music Studio pre-installed. In addition, the SA, L, F and E series are all getting speed bumps, as are pre-configured SB and Z series laptops. Oh, and the SB is now available in red. Got it? Good. Lots of up to date specs at the source link.
Engadget's back to school guide 2011: laptops
Welcome to Engadget's Back to School guide! We know that this time of year can be pretty annoying and stressful for everyone, so we're here to help out with the heartbreaking process of gadget buying for the school-aged crowd. Today we're getting down to the very important business of helping you sift through laptops, and you can always head to the Back to School hub to see the rest of the product guides as they're added throughout the month. Be sure to keep checking back -- at the end of the month we'll be giving away a ton of the gear featured in our guides -- and hit up the hub page right here! Ah, laptops. Some of us received our first notebooks the summer before college if not later. But times have changed and we're sure for many of the kids reading this freshman year is just an excuse to upgrade from the clunkers that carried them through high school. Either way, this one's pretty much mandatory -- unless you're a serious gamer who insists on a desktop GPU for marathon sessions of CoD: Black Ops, you're going to need a laptop for pounding out last-minute term papers in the library, taking notes in class and posting incriminating photos on Facebook. The problem is, the market's overrun with laptops that purport to be just perfect for the back to school set. They can't all be worth your money, though, so we whittled the list down to a handful of choices for each budget -- and if you're lucky you'll get your very own HP Pavilion dm1z for the pretty price of, well, nothing. Simply leave a comment below to be entered to win, and check out our giveaway page for more details. So wipe off the glasses, grab your clicker, and get ready to jump past the break for a top-level overview of this year's picks for back to school.
Sony announces VAIO SA series ultraportable, puts VAIO F series up for pre-order
Having trouble keeping Sony's slim VAIO S series laptops straight? It's okay, we are, too, especially now that the company's officially unveiled the SA series, a 13.3-inch ultraportable that's poised to go toe to toe with the skinny Lenovo ThinkPad X1. Although it's got almost the same magnesium-and-alloy chassis as the VAIO SB series we saw at CES, the SA is a hair thinner, at 0.95 inches, and comes standard with AMD Radeon HD 6630 graphics and 1GB of video memory, 1600 x 900 resolution, a 500GB hard drive, fingerprint reader, and a Blu-ray drive. You can also trick it out with a dual channel solid-state drive, which promises to help let you work up to 16 hours unplugged if you combine it with a $100 sheet battery. If you fork out a minimum of $1,650, you can snag one with an SSD. If the SA's $1,350 starting price is more than you're willing to spend, there's still the SB series, though the $969 base model naturally has less impressive specs, including 512MB of video memory, 1366 x 768 resolution, a DVD player, and a Core i5 -- not Core i7 -- processor. For what its worth, its color options now include pink and navy, if that floats your boat more than the high-end SA's black, silver, and brown palette. In other news, Sony's also taking orders for the VAIO F Series, which comes in two flavors: one with a 16-inch 3D display with a 2D-to-3D conversion button, starting at $1,659, and a 16.4-inch 2D model with a more modest $1,100 base price. But if you want a 2D display with 1080p resolution and a Blu-ray drive, you can expect to pay at least $1,169. Both these and the SA series are up for pre-order today, with gussied-up photos below and full PR and past the break. %Gallery-124462% %Gallery-124461%
Sony VAIO SA and SB show up at European e-tailers with 13-inch screens, Core i5 / i7 CPUs, SSD options
Looks like Sony is preparing to freshen up the top end of its laptop range with a pair of new VAIO series, the SA and SB. An Intel Core i7-2620M is found populating a listing for an SA1X9E/XI model, alongside 4GB of DDR3 RAM, 128GB of SSD storage, AMD Radeon HD 6630M graphics, and a 1600 x 900 resolution squeezed into a 13.3-inch screen. All that for a measly £1,571 (nearly $2,500). What's intriguing about that 2.7GHz dual-core CPU is that Intel lists a February 20th launch date for it, potentially giving us a hint as to when Sony will put the trigger with its refresh. The VAIO SB laptops are set to be the tamer offering, being built around the latest Core i5 chips, though we've yet to know for certain what any of these new machines will actually look like. So, for your speculative pleasure, we've embedded a video after the break with some prototypes spotted at CES that could end up slapped with the SA / SB labels.
