New Sony VAIO A-Series laptops combine Style with Substance

Sony Vaio A-Series laptops include models with Intel Pentium M 735/745 processor & 17" widescreen.

Commenting on the launch, Jun Koyama, Information Technology Europe Sales and Marketing Director said: “At Sony it is understood that people care about more than the nuts and bolts of a notebook. It is a personal possession, and one which they wish to take a certain pride in. With the Sony VAIO A-Series, we have created a range of laptops that meet today’s much higher expectations of such personal technology.

The Sony VAIO A-Series laptops are machines which have an aspirational dimension, which is reflected in their extremely high design values as much as the technical sophistication they offer.” The attention to detail is evident throughout, ensuring every Sony VAIO A-Series laptop projects quality from every angle.

Behind the cosmetics, the Sony VAIO A-Series casing is a model of practicality. Magnesium alloy is employed strategically in the side panels imparting maximum durability but without driving up the weight.

The Sony VAIO A-Series’ aesthetic advantages are built on solid foundations. All A-Series laptops are performance-boosted by Intel’s Pentium M processors, and both consumer and professional ranges will feature machines based on the new Pentium M® 735/745 engineered to deliver the best mobile performance yet. What’s more, every Sony VAIO A-Series laptop bears the Intel Centrino certification. This means the latest mobile-optimised technology, yielding more power and longer battery life.

Users can also rely on the fact that the wireless networking built into Centrino systems has been tested for compatibility with wireless networks all over the world.

All Sony VAIO A-Series laptops support the new, high-speed wireless standard which operates up to five times faster than the original while remaining fully backwardly compatible with existing networks (802.11g). Certain Sony VAIO A-Series models are distinguished by wide screens, in some cases a very high resolution WUXGA panel featuring a 17-inch diagonal. These exceptional displays offer super-bright and high contrast viewing characteristics for DVD movies and gaming, as well as a significantly expanded Windows Desktop. The larger workspace area compared to conventional systems ensures that users scroll less and do more. Top-end ATI MOBILITY™ RADEON™ graphics processors complete the visual sophistication on offer, elevating mobile 3D performance to new levels.

Most Sony VAIO A-Series laptops feature Dual RW DVD±RW burners, providing users with maximum compatibility with dedicated consumer DVD players alongside the convenience of being able to build up archives over time using multi-session recording. Sony’s specially developed Click to DVD software is included to simplify and streamline the burning process.

In order to ensure that the Sony VAIO A-Series laptops deliver the sort of user experience expected of a true premium product, the design incorporates several less obvious but extremely useful features. Plug & Display can instantly step down the laptop’s super-high screen resolution to the appropriate lower level when certain video peripherals are connected. This greatly simplifies the use of devices like projectors, which do not support extended resolutions, as it requires no intervention from the user. Subtle and continuous ergonomic enhancement is provided by the Auto Luminance Sensor, which monitors ambient lighting conditions and automatically adjusts the brightness of the screen for comfortable viewing and battery saving. As a final touch, not only do most Sony VAIO A-Series laptops support Bluetooth for seamless wireless links to handhelds and mobile phones, they are also designed to be used with a wireless mouse. A specially designed RF mouse (radio frequency) mouse, which complements the Sony VAIO A-Series design aesthetic is available on the top-end 17” A-series laptop (VGN-A197XP).

All Sony VAIO A-Series laptops are augmented by a wide array of applications software designed to open up the full potential of each machine. The software suite comes in three parts, with Microsoft Works 7.0 providing the everyday essentials, Sony’s VAIO applications acting as a sophisticated audio-visual toolkit, and the Adobe Companion Pack for VAIO adding yet another dimension for users to explore.

The Adobe Companion Pack is exclusive to Sony’s VAIO product family, and contains a special version of Adobe Premiere Standard, empowering users with a powerful but easily mastered video editing capability. The highly-regarded Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 photo editor complements Premiere Standard, and Photoshop Album Starter Edition provides comprehensive tools for managing any photo archive. The Adobe Companion Pack also makes it easy to prepare a wide range of documents for sharing with other users. The Adobe Acrobat Elements resource, included along with the latest version of the Acrobat Reader, can convert files created by Microsoft applications including Word, Excel and Powerpoint into Acrobat PDF format, ready for electronic distribution.

NOTES TO THE EDITOR

A new Intel® Pentium® M 735/745 processor

The top-end Sony VAIO A-Series laptops are equipped with the very latest generation of Intel® Pentium® M mobile processor. The new CPUs contain a remarkable 140 million transistors compared to the 77 million on the standard Pentium® M. Much of the increase is accounted for by the 2MB on-die Level 2 cache, twice the size of that incorporated into the Pentium® M. The doubling of the cache size produces an instant boost in performance without the need for increased clock speeds. The advantage for laptops is twofold, since the additional speed is achieved without the need for more power to run a faster CPU, so battery life is not significantly affected.

17-inch Widescreen: a VAIO first

Certain Sony VAIO A-Series laptops are distinguished by their highly advanced wide screen LCD panels which considerably exceed the capabilities of most desktop PC displays. The Sony VAIO A-Series panels have a full 17-inch viewable diagonal, and operate at Wide UXGA resolution (1920 x 1200), delivering a remarkable 2.3 megapixels, or very nearly three times as much workspace as conventional 1024 x 768 XGA. The wide screen format means DVD films never looked better, and the ‘letterbox’ effect is eliminated, while working with applications is transformed by the huge increase in space on the Windows Desktop. On top of all this, the 17-inch LCDs also benefit from Sony’s exclusive screen technology, detailed below.

Sony’s exceptional LCD’s

Conventional LCD screens are usually coated at the front with a light-diffusing layer intended to reduce reflection from the surface. A potential drawback to this approach can arise if light from the LCD itself is also scattered and diffused as it passes through the anti-reflection coating. This scattering effect causes black areas of the image to appear washed out, and lighter in tone than they should. It has a similar effect on colours, which lose their depth and vibrancy. Sony exclusive LCD panels are powerfully lit by special lamps, and use a reflection-reduction layer that has no diffusing effect on the light passing through it from the screen, and therefore no negative impact on image quality. This means these displays are consistently very bright, with a wide and extreme range of contrast. Colours appear vivid and lifelike, and blacks more truly black. Graphics: backstage

One of the many advantages offered by the Sony VAIO A-Series is superior graphics processing power. Even the demands of complex 3D games are met in full by the potent ATI MOBILITY™ RADEON™ GPUs selected for the range. Some Sony VAIO A-Series models are configured with the MOBILITY™ RADEON™ 9200, while selected consumer and professional systems come with ATI’s flagship MOBILITY™ RADEON™ 9700 for the last word in power 3D graphics on a mobile platform. ATI’s MOBILITY™ RADEON™ 9200 dedicated notebook graphics processor supports Microsoft’s® DirectX® 8.1 for enhanced 3D performance and visual effects. High performance GPUs need realistic amounts of local memory to reach their potential, which is why every Sony VAIO A-Series laptop comes as standard with 64MB of fast VRAM.

The MOBILITY™ RADEON™ 9700 is ATI’s most powerful and advanced laptop GPU to date. It supports Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 and is optimised for wide-screen LCDs. It also supports multiple external devices, has hardware MPEG decoding for smooth DVD playback, and features internal power management for the optimum balance between performance and battery life.

Sony VAIO Essentials: exclusive VAIO accessories

Users can enhance any Sony VAIO A-Series laptop with a selection of accessories from Sony’s VAIO Essentials range. These include an optional port replicator (VGP-PRA1) which offers to users smooth connections to their peripherals (4 x USB 2.0; Parallel; VGA; DVI-D; S-video; Composite video; Audio-in/out (cinch port); Optical Audio Out; LAN (RJ45)). For users requiring power on the move, an additional battery is available (PCGA-BP2EA). Essentials for the traveler include VAIO Carry cases (PCGE-CCP2/CCM2/ CCL2) and the new VAIO back pack (VGP-EMB01). Memory can be increased to 1GB using top quality 512MB modules (VGP-MM512G). The standard 1-year VAIO warranty can be extended by two additional years (PCGE-VPW2).