There's no question the 505 is sleek and stylish; Sony even manages to give the magnesium alloy casing a very nice purplish hue. It ships with an 850MHz Pentium III processor, 128MB of memory, and a 30GB hard disk split into two equal partitions. The 12.1in screen is clear and bright, although by default it goes a bit too dark when you switch to power saving mode. Sony says battery life is anywhere between 3 and 4.5 hours.
It weighs in at only 1.7kg and, as you'd expect with a notebook this small, for full functionality you'll need a docking station. In this case, the docking station adds a combination DVD and CD-RW drive, a floppy drive and a few extra ports, as well as replicating some of the ports in the notebook itself. But the notebook still has external monitor, USB, modem, network, i.LINK (Sony's name for IEEE 1394) and audio in/out ports. This separation is fairly well thought out, and for giving presentations or working on the go, you should have everything you need without the docking station. On the downside, there's only one PC card slot in the notebook, and the docking station doesn't add any.
The notebook ships with Windows XP Home edition, which is a definite plus for multimedia handling features, and also a host of multimedia software. However, once you factor in the operating system and the various utilities Sony runs in the background-some of which you can't turn off-80MB of the notebook's 128MB of memory are already taken, which doesn't leave a great deal of space for running applications. For multimedia use, upping the memory to 256MB is a must.
Like most new Sony products, the 505 has a memory stick slot. This makes it fantastic for interoperating with other Sony products such as digital cameras, as well as audio players and recorders. However, Sony seems to be going it alone with Memory Stick while the rest of the industry is favouring Secure Digital, so you may be locked in to Sony products unless you get a PC-card SD reader.
While final pricing was not available at time of writing, Sony assures us that the RRP for this Vaio will be significantly less than that of the previous model (which retailed at AU$5899).
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