Sony yesterday announced a brand new addition to its Vaio family with the E Series 14P range of laptops. The mid-range devices certainly aren't the most powerful laptops that Sony has ever released, nor the best looking, but it is hoped that with a reasonable price tag they may be seen as a solid choice for those looking for solid entry point into the popular range of devices.
The laptops all come with a 14" 1366 x 768 display powered by the Intel Core i3 2550M processor and 4GB of RAM as standard. Additionally, users will be able to select from either the Intel HD Graphics 3000 or AMD Radeon HD 7670M graphics processors. While the specs are far from inspiring, it's encouraging to see that the scaling back on the power front does mean that Sony has managed to eek a very reasonable seven hours of battery life out of a single charge - impressive stuff from a non-Apple device.
While it's not going to be a range that serious gamers or multimedia producers are going to have much interest in, we can certainly see the E Series going to on to become a very popular choice among everyday users searching for top bang for their buck. No pricing has yet been announced, but we don't expect potential buyers to have to break the bank in order to pick one up when they are released later this year.
For those of you turning your nose up at the prospect, it's also worth noting that the devices will feature gestural based control, where users will be able to swipe between active programs, adjust volume and multimedia settings by touch and control DVD playback without needing to use the mousepad. Again, it's not groundbreaking stuff, but it's certainly a fine entry level product that we're looking forward to seeing more of.