[ Overview | Rationale | My Experience | Others' Experiences | Vendors | Benchmarks | Keyboard | Box | Booting | Q & A | The Future | Translations | Links ]

Overview: The Sony U101 a.k.a. the Sony PCG-U101

The Sony PCG-U101 laptop is an amazing piece of machinery. It's fully PC-compatible, weighs about as much as a jar of peanut butter, and is about the size of two DVD cases when closed.

7.5" by 5.5" by 1.3", and a mere 1.9 pounds. Intel Celeron 600A, 256 Mb of RAM, 30 Gb hard disk. 266 MHz front-side bus. 1024x768 at 32-bits, with an ATI Radeon Mobility chipset. Built-in 10/100 Ethernet and 802.11b. 3 to 5½ hour battery. Yeah, the U101 weighs about that much. According to my postal meter, this jar weighs in at 1.9 pounds, or 1.75 pounds of peanut butter and 2 ounces of plastic. That's a far cry from the 6½ pound bowling balls most people call laptops.

Yes, it's small. Since everybody knows what a CD looks like, it makes a good comparison, don't you think? This is a copy of Charpentier's Te Deum Magnificat (H.146, ca. 1700) sitting on the U101's keyboard. Screen image is not simulated: that really is Windows XP Home Japanese booting. The U101 is about the size of the extended DVD edition of The Fellowship of the Ring. In fact, in the fifth photo here, the U101 is almost invisible in the stack of DVDs. That's a lot smaller than your usual briefcase-size laptop.