April Fools – Sony VAIO Q Series Ultrabook Launched

April 1st, 2012 by

Sony did have some good news today to counterbalance the rather shocking PS Vita news.  Via their corporate blog Sony both announced and launched a new VAIO Ultrabook.  What makes this Ultrabook special is that it is by far the smallest laptop ever mass-produced.  With a screen size of only 1.25″x0.75″, the VAIO Q can easily fit in pretty much anybody’s pockets.  The specs that they managed to pack into this device (as listed above) are also astounding and almost blow my huge custom gaming computer out of the water.  Needless to say, such a capable, 3D-enabled computer of such miniscule dimensions is really putting the heat on portable video game consoles, as why would you want to carry around devices with bulky 3″ screens when you could play Crysis 2 at Max DirectX 11 settings anywhere you wanted?

I’m going to have to drop by my local Sony store pretty soon to check this out because I still have a couple reservations.  The monocle that they show that’s used to make the screen appear larger looks slightly uncomfortable.  I hope that they had the foresight to put padding on it or something to reduce strain when gaming for a couple hours at a time.  The keyboard and trackpad are also so small that they’re basically mutually exclusive, meaning that you could probably only manage to use one of them at a time.  There is a dock that allows you to attach regular USB peripherals to the VAIO Q and I hope that it comes with it for free, because I can imagine that most people that will but this device will probably want to supply their own keyboards and mice to ensure that they can be used at the same time, especially for gaming purposes.  Make sure to check out the announcement video or the official product page to see a few of the different ways in which this clever piece of tech can be used.

We’ll have an impressions article about whether or not this will end up being a good gaming device in the next couple of days when we get a chance to visit a Sony store and try it out.