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