Everex's Cloudbook and Sony's Vaio Premium SZ

Ahmad

Everex's Cloudbook and Sony's Vaio Premium SZ are very different machines. The former is an efficient little budget subnotebook that costs only $399, but has better specifications than the similarly-priced Asus Eee PC. The Vaio Premium SZ is a high-revving 13.3" beast that grinds down its battery in less than 90 minutes and costs about $3,000: you couldn't spec a MacBook to match it even if you wanted to.

Both the scrappy little Cloudbook and the wallet-pounding Vaio, however, offered a curiously similar first impression.

Everexs Cloudbook and Sonys Vaio Premium SZ

The Cloudbook, powered by a 1.2 Ghz Via C7-M processor, has 512Mb of RAM, a 30GB hard drive, a seven-inch 800x480 display powered by a unichrome video chip, WiFi and gOS Linux. Weighing only 2 pounds, it's designed for students, kids, and others who'll get by just fine with the basics.

The Vaio Premium SZ has a 2.5 GHz T9300 Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of RAM, a 1280x800 display powered by an Nvidia 8400M video card with 64 MB of its own discrete memory, WiFi, Sprint mobile broadband and Windows Vista Business. It's designed for people who want untrammeled power in compact form, dressed in an exotic and stylish alloy casing.

Both are fantastic machines, but both are hobbled by something that has nothing to do with how contextually superior their hardware is.