entertainment book hotels: Sony announces VAIO SA series ultraportable, puts VAIO F series up for pre-order

Friday, May 27, 2011

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 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. The catch: you'll have to fork out a minimum of $1,650 just to snag one with an SSD.

If the SA's $1,375 starting price is more than you're willing to spend, there's still the SB series, though the $999 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 $1,840, and a 16.4-inch 2D model with a more modest $799 base price. But if you want a 2D display with 1080p resolution and a Blu-ray drive, you can expect to pay at least $1,125. 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: Sony VAIO SA series