Sony 18.4-inch VAIO AW Notebook - First Look Preview

[Ahmad]

Sony VAIO AW replaces the AR and has some of the same barrel-hinged design cues as the FW. Also like its smaller cousin, the AW switches from a smaller 16:10 ratio display to a larger 16:9 display, in this case moving to a new 18.4-inch, 1920x1080 panel suited to playing movies from the notebook's stock Blu-ray drive. Sony claims extreme color accuracy at 104 percent of the NTSC color gamut for the base LCD; an LED-backlit screen is even richer at 137 percent of the spectrum.





The internals also receive a major upgrade and switch to a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo, a GeForce 9600M GT for graphics, twin 250GB hard drives for storage and a minimum of 2GB of RAM. An 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter is standard, while optional storage can switch to dual 64GB solid-state drives in a RAID stripe when speed is more important than size.





Sony plans to ship the AW to Japan on September 20th and is unofficially expected to price its systems at the equivalent of $2,792 for the standard version and $2,978 for the LED-backlit model. A US release is expected but will likely have multiple and less expensive configurations.