Sony launches a couple of Vaio notebooks

JAPANESE ELECTRONICS AND MEDIA CONGLOMERATE Sony unveiled two new additions to its E-Series Vaio laptops.

The company watered down its Vaio range recently to support nearly every price point. But the new Vaio E Series 14-inch and ultra slim mobile Vaio E Series 17-inch models are resolutely mid to high-performance offerings.

The Vaio E Series 14-inch comes available in a rainbow livery, from gloss white, pink and blue to green and 'classic', if you want something more understated. You can pay extra moola for a black version with "Blu-ray capability" but Sony said all its E-Series Vaio models have a Blu-ray drive. We can only presume this means that that the 1600x900, 16:9 screen resolution gets an upgrade to the full 1920x1080 HD. Sony also claims that the Vaio E Series will have a deep high-gloss finish and a low-resistance touchpad.

The Vaio E Series 17-inch does have full HD playback with a built-in Blu-ray optical drive and a 17.3 inch display with an LED backlight. Sony has left room for two hard disk drives with a maximum 500GB of storage and has put a full-sized numeric keypad on the side.

Both models will have web button for surfing without booting up, quick web access for multiple tabbed browsing and a 'split' view side-by-side browsing mode. The Vaio E series 14-inch model has an Intel Core i3-330M 2.13GHz processor and the 17-inch version has gone for an Intel Core i5-430M at 2.26GHz. Both Vaio notebooks will also have 4GB of RAM, with a 512MB HD 5145 ATI Mobility Radeon GPU for the 14-inch model and a 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 GPU for the 17-inch model.

What is missing from the launch information is any mention of green credentials to satisfy the eco-warrior in you. The last Vaio E-Series models we noticed included a whole raft of environmentally sound features but there's nary a word about that regarding these two models.

Sony hasn't released any price information yet but has said that both models will be out this May. µ