CES 2012: Sony Ultrabook and Ultraportable

Sony will be changing the design of all its laptops in June. The leitmotif is slimline lightness. The new chassis will take Sony up to March 2013.

Of course we're talking ultrabooks and ultraportables (more powerful than ultrabooks), which, as you should now be aware, are very much the current flavour of choice.

The Sony ultrabook:

It's all in metal and it has to be said that it's simply magnificent! Sony is insisting on the fact that it incorporates full connectivity without having recourse to adaptors. Indeed it has a network socket, for example, and an HDMI and so on. Not all ultrabooks can boast as much. Also, notably, these are hybrid machines, combining SSD and hard drive.

This ultrabook with a 13-inch screen doesn't yet have an official name but will be launched in June, starting at around £600. It weighs in at 1.5 Kg.

For another hundred pounds or so Sony is giving us an ultraportable, available in 13 and 15-inch versions, the S and Z series machines, equipped with a more powerful (unrestrained, by Sony's own admission) processor. These are not hybrids and you'll have to choose between the available SSD and HDD configurations. They have an optical drive, higher screen definition and a discrete graphics card (an IGP on the ultrabook).

The S and Z ultraportables will be launched in June and while the 13-inch weighs 1.45 Kg, we don't yet have this information for the 15-inch. Neither ultraportable is on show at CES 2012 so we only have Sony's word to go on, but apparently they're 300 grammes lighter than the 2011 models (see image below) and therefore also a good deal slimmer:

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