An evening with the Sony Vaio P (2009)
[Music] [Music] in 2009 my dad used to take me to a part of Sydney called Chatswood every weekend dad and I would wander around while my little brother was doing his Chinese lessons I'd insist every time that we would visit my favorite store Sony Central some kids want to go to Disneyland but my Disneyland was Sony Central I've always been a Sony boy and this store was pure Sony I'd spend hours walking around admiring all the cool products I'd take little videos and photos of them on my Sony Ericson w910i phone so that I could look at them some more when I got home but today's story centers around a particular day when I wandered in and stumbled upon on the viop P series I was so astounded by it I took this very photo on my Sony ericon phone I've wanted one ever since the planet aligned last year when I visited Tew in the UK to make a laptop death match video I finally found one look at it that is a whole computer right there so how about you and I sit back and get a beverage maybe a cup of tea or a beer if that's more your thing as we take some time to reflect and remember the magic of Sony's viol line [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh oh [Music] when I got this fiop back it was in a sorry State running Windows 8 with no drivers and much of its original Sony charm gone I'd given up hope on restoring it to the magical state with Vista that it was in its days of being new but some godsend uploaded the recovery discs recently so now we can restore this voo to as it was when I saw it that day [Music] m [Music] [Applause] [Music] bio deut it's a son [Music] bio for [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] memory stick Tano it's a Sony [Music] [Music] [Music] there's a lot to be said about the vop with enough interest maybe there's even another video in it I could dive into the specs talk about its painfully slow CPU its exorbitant price at the time or how Windows Vista scaled horribly to its display in 2009 but The viop series's Faults Are well documented and I don't want to dwell on those instead I want to share my five favorite things about this ambitious little DC so if you haven't got a cup of tea or a beer yet Now's the Time to get [Music] one this was not Sony's first rodeo in the micro PC realm the viop series comes from a long lineage of Ultra Mobile Legends but even with this storied history behind it its size is something truly extraordinary to put it into perspective I've gathered a bunch of household objects for scale and as you can see this thing is truly tiny it exists in a category all of its own a category that is now largely ruled by the GPD line of PCS the viop was ahead of its time and its painfully slow atom CPU underscores the fact that the technology just wasn't ready for the dream that Sony had for this machine it does however make me dream of what the viop could have achieved with today's low power technology I don't know about you but I would buy a ryzen version of one of these in a heartbeat but let's rewind 2009 despite its CPU the vop was jam packed with features for its size it boasted SD and memory stick slots two USB ports ethernet and VGA with a dongle WiFi mobile broadband antennas and Sim slot buil-in as well as GPS yeah credit where credit is due the viop packed an impressive array of features into a truly tiny form factor Bravo Sony [Music] [Music] the part of the viop that captivated me the most when I saw it in 2009 was its incredible display it packed an ultrawide LED display at a time when this was far from standard it's bright colorful and featured Sony's x black technology for richer blacks at, 1600 by 768 it doesn't sound that high res but when you can consider its size the DPI ends up being an astonishingly High 222 it looks remarkably sharp even today while its viewing angles do leave a bit to be desired it's a remarkable display for a laptop from 2009 let's have a look at a few samples of some 2x 35 by1 movies running in their full cinematic aspect ratio on on this display [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] for fans of the Friga era style there's a magic to vista's glassy aesthetic and while the vop may not be able to run the full glass arrow interface Vista and its fruer Arrow looks feel right at home on this Vio let's just enjoy this style of a Time Gone by [Music] [Applause] [Music] one thing I miss intensely about Sony's viol line was the quirkiness and the character of the apps that Sony would build into these laptops it was never enough for Sony to just make a Windows laptop they always had to add something more and in this case it's the PlayStation 3 cross media bar styled viom media plus bet up with all those different compatibility issues when you link all your media devices well with biom media plus there's no more need for plugins because media plus is a tool that communicates all media between different DLNA compliant devices so they're all accessible from one place it sees all formats as compatible so you can for example link your Ps 3 to your voo and watch your media content from your PS3 instead of your voo media plus uses digital living network Alliance or DLNA technology to enable you to share all your content on your network whether it is wired or Wi-Fi so are you still wired up or are you bio you must respect Sony's ambition to encourage you to run to use your viop as a media server but the cross media bath interface here is pretty cool Sony tried some very interesting things they pre-loaded the viop with what they called xdj a sorting system for a bunch of music that they pre-loaded onto it and I assume they wanted you to pre-load more this music of so many categories and moods that they sorted it into and I love the way that this interface almost encourages you to have your viop as the centerpiece of your living experience where you choose music that suits every mood on xdj there's even this strange feature called chorus playback where the viop will only play the choruses of songs and then softly fade between each chorus of each song it's absolutely fascinating and honestly a pretty cool feature for someone like me who often just wants to get to what I would call the good part of the song This X DJ and X chorus comes across to the slideshow function as well you can run just choruses of songs from the Sony's pre-loaded Library as you look at your photos [Music] and I admire the ambition and the spirit of innovation imbued in this laptop [Music] [Music] one of the little known features of this Vio and I think one of its coolest things is it's instant on mode fully aware that Vista would take some time to boot up Sony designed in the instant on mode you press this button and after about 20 seconds the viop boots in a Linux based OS with the PlayStation 3's cross media bar interface this is separate to Windows but it has access to the media filing system from Windows so you can look at photos videos the internet from this interface without having to boot into windows it's one of the coolest instant on modes I've seen I put it to the test where I took my handicam filmed some footage and then imagined that I came just home and wanted to watch the footage straight away and to give Sony credit the instanton feature works you put the memory stick in and you can be from cold power off to into the video whereas doing the exact same task filming footage and then trying to look at it with Windows Vista takes 3 minutes surprisingly as well the playback quality as the CPU is not overloaded or weighed down by Vista is better this same EG standard def video runs better on the instant on mode smoothly as you can see whereas the same video on VLC or Windows Media Player has started [Music] [Music] [Music] I called this video an evening with the viop because that's all that I wanted this to be I wanted to share an evening with you hanging out and telling you all about this fascinating slice of computing history the viop was full of innovative cool ideas but the tech just wasn't ready to back them up there is hope for the viop and hope for Ultra Portables like this as I said earlier in this video the GPD line have done a fantastic job filling the micro PC shoes and as time has gone on the viop has become a bit of a cult classic people are still tinkering with it and it's still a fascinating machine to a lot of people there are a couple really cool projects which you can check out through the links in the description now these projects are currently theoretical they're not targeting a commercial product yet but they do speak to the amazing Innovation and how this laptop still manages to cap capture people's hearts so feel free to check out those articles if you want to learn more about what people are doing these days with the viop anyway if you'd like to hear more about this laptop in another video or maybe see it try gaming or another OS then let me know in the comments but until then this was a relaxed evening with the viop and I hope you enjoyed it thanks again for watching and good night [Music] [Music] [Music] a [Music] [Music] hello Wen come on Jonathan is here look at him the mustached Beast
2025-01-05 17:54
