Sony Lifestyle PC (VGN-588EQ) reviews – netbook at the pinnacle of engineering

Thursday, January 22, 2009, 4:41
Laptops
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Priced at $1199, the Sony VAIO VGN-588EQ is better known by another name, the Sony Lifestyle PC. The Lifestyle PC offers the features that nobody has ever seen on a laptop. The Lifestyle sports 8-inch LED widescreen, which is first of its kind. The laptop entices anyone when they see it for the first time. The Lifestyle offers all the features of a netbook like its Intel Atom platform, undersized keyboard. But it is an understatement to call it a netbook as it offers much more than a netbook. But there is no other way to describe the Lifestyle PC. The netbook weighs half as much as an average netbook and offers features like 3G wireless along with pre-boot Linux environment and high-resolution screen. The Lifestyle PC represents great engineering but its Windows Vista OS may cause some concerns about its performance.

Weighing just 1.4 pounds, the Lifestyle PC measures 9.7 x 4.7 x 0.8 inches. The netbooks fits easily in the inner pocket of a suit jacket. The netbook is so thin that you can fit two of them into a manila envelope. The Sony has compressed the height of the netbook so as to maintain physical dimension. So the display of Lifestyle PC appears very wide. Though the screen is relatively small but is offers impressive resolution of 1600×768 as compared to the 1,024-by-600 resolution of most netbooks. The display is capable of displaying three windows side by side and movie fills the entire screen. The videos and images looks brilliant but the text looks small due to high resolution.

The large width of the Lifestyle PC allowed the Sony to provide an 87% keyboard, which is little smaller than the keyboard of Lenovo IdeaPad S10. The keys are slightly raised above the surface and are provided adequate spacing between them. Due to small size of the netbook Lifestyle is provided with a pointing stick rather than a touchpad. Moreover, the Lifestyle PC does not have palm rest area.

The Lifestyle PC is capable of booting into a Linux environment without booting the Vista. This feature is quite helpful when there is critical battery life. The Linux allows you access all the physical drives, network connections, and applications, like Skype and Firefox.

The Lifestyle PC offers all the features of a typical netbook along with some additional features which include two USB ports, separate card slots for both Memory Stick and Secure Digital (SD) formats. The netbook also sports a 64GB solid-state drive (SSD) but you can also go for 60GB hard-drive alternative spinning at 4,200 rpm. The Lifestyle PC uses Verizon’s EV-DO Rev A 3G service. The Lifestyle PC also features Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth but it lacks VGA and Ethernet ports due to thin chassis. But an adapter, which houses Ethernet and VGA, can be plugged into the AC adapter.