Monday, June 2,2008 @ 8:55am
Sony jumping into Eee PC's micro notebook market?
Sony could be the next major PC builder to leap into the micro notebook field, an inadvertent leak at the WiMAX Expo has shown. An 8.9-inch notebook made by Quanta and based on VIA's OpenBook reference platform reportedly lists Sony as the manufacturer, suggesting the PC is a prototype of a future production model for the Japanese company. A Quanta official asked about the computer declines to confirm the Sony origins.
While the view provides limited information about the notebook, a limited glance suggests the system varies slighly from VIA's stock system, with a 1.6GHz C7-M processor as well as a 60GB hard drive, 1GB of memory, and Windows Vista Home Basic. The demonstrator at the Expo appropriately includes WiMAX for access to the 4G-grade wireless network format. Whether the system is intended for use on Sprint's Xohm network is unknown.
Sony has not stepped up to claim the system and isn't known to have been making a system outside of the report; however, the move would suggest the company is responding to the ASUS Eee PC and other small systems, and will launch after competing systems from other very large PC makers, such as the Dell mini-Inspiron and the HP Mini-Note. Most of these systems use Intel Atom or Celeron M processors, though the HP system uses a customized design based on VIA's C7-M.