Sony's Costly Combination
By Alan S. Kay
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, January 19, 2001 ; Page E13
The definition of "convergence" keeps changing as our assorted electronic devices evolve and cross-breed. Some of these fusions will probably make sense someday (for instance, phone/handheld-organizer combos) while others may never (say, kitchen e-mail devices to track your grocery and holiday card lists).
And then there's the Sony Vaio C1VN PictureBook, which combines a digital camera with a tiny laptop computer. This 10-by-6-by-1-inch, 2.2-pound miniature notebook -- on sale since October but still in short supply -- is also the first shipping laptop in the United States to use Transmeta's low-power Crusoe chip.
This stylish laptop looks a bit like a thinner version of Toshiba's tiny Libretto, with the addition of a few years of experience and some Sony engineering. But its 1,024-by-768-pixel display is sharp and bright, even when viewed from the side, and its compact keyboard, despite a few oddities, is surprisingly usable.
Above it sits the Motion Eye camera, a 2.5-inch rotating digital camera parked in the edge of the lid, just atop the screen. This digicam is no great shakes by today's standards: It's built on a 350,000-pixel CCD, which can store images at resolutions up to 640x480 (only a third as sharp as most new digicams). It can also record full-motion video at up to 30 frames per second.
You won't buy this machine for business travel or to download your e-mail. Sony has put it together as a portable multimedia tool, with lots of image-processing software, 128 megabytes of memory, a roomy 11-gigabyte drive, a fast i.Link (a k a IEEE-1394) port to accept video from digital camcorders and a Memory Stick slot to move files to and from Sony digicams, MP3 players and the like.
But that Memory Stick slot forces you to use a pricier "MagicGate" flavor of Memory Sticks to transfer music, part of Sony's clumsy strategy of using restrictive software to try to prevent music piracy. And while the PictureBook throws in a PC Card slot and USB and phone jacks, there are no serial, parallel, infrared or Ethernet ports; leaving out the latter two just seems odd.
As is often the case with Sony consumer products, there are lots of quirky design touches here, not all of which make much sense. The camera is easy to use, but it's ultimately silly; a fixed-location camera attached to the screen will probably be used for little more than head shots of you and your friends (you can swivel it to face outward, but then you'll often have to hoist two pounds of laptop to aim the lens).
Likewise, the PictureBook's jog dial -- a side-mounted wheel, similar to those on Sony's phones, that allows a user to control the laptop -- left us puzzled. Its context-sensitive software causes it to do different things when different applications or windows are open; it may be fast and convenient, but you'd have to use it a lot to find out.
The PictureBook's software bundle -- beyond applications for capturing, editing and packaging still and video images, plus the usual Windows extras -- includes Word 2000 (but none of the other Microsoft Office components), Netscape Communicator and the cut-down, year-old Quicken 2000 Basic. What's also in there is Windows Millennium Edition, which means the machine takes half of forever -- or three minutes 55 seconds by the stopwatch -- to boot up.
Once up and running, we found, the PictureBook's Crusoe chip worked well, delivering enough processing power to handle digital image editing without any sign of heat buildup. By using power-management settings to slow down the chip and dim the display, we were able to get as much as four hours of use. In full performance mode, though, the 18-watt-hour battery hit its auto-hibernate point after only one hour and 43 minutes.
For all this, you'll pay $2,299.99. That's a lot of money for a little machine with limited utility. Do check one out, though; for a glimpse into Sony's idiosyncratic approach to designing electronic products, it's priceless.
© 2001 The Washington Post
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