HEDIRMAN SUPIAN hedirman@mediacorp.com.sg Ultra-thin laptops are common these days but none sports the small footprint of the Sony Vaio P. With a thickness of 20mm, you can easily fit the eight-inch device into a handbag. It weighs a mere 594g when fitted with the solid state drive or 620g with the standard hard drive. . The keyboard lacks a wrist rest and a trackpoint replaces the standard trackpad. Despite its small size, the keyboard is easy to use. However, a flaw in the placement of the spacebar and the mouse buttons had us hitting the latter instead of the intended spacebar. . Though the Vaio P comes pre-installed with Windows Home Premium, the performance of its 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor with 2GB of memory feels only a margin faster than the netbooks we’ve tried so far. . The 64GB solid state drive — while fast enough for standard tasks, multimedia and Internet use — made for lengthy boot-up times when starting up or waking from sleep. . It also skipped frames when we played high-definition movies from the Web. . The notebook has WiFi (802.11b/g/*) and Bluetooth but we wish it had 3G as well. You can hook up Gigabit Ethernet or a VGA cable through an external adapter. A built-in webcam takes care of video conferencing on the move and Sony has also included a pair of noise-cancelling earphones. . The 8-inch widescreen display has a native resolution of 1,600x768, making it sharp and bright enough for outdoor use. But because of its high resolution and rather low profile, we ended up squinting at the text. . You can access multimedia files without launching Vista by using the “instant-on” mode. The interface bears a lot of similarity with the XMB (Cross Media Bar) in the PlayStation 3 and Playstation Portable but it isn’t quite as slick. This mode allows you to surf the Net on Firefox and use an instant-messaging application as well. . We managed to eke out about three hours of battery life using the Vaio P with conservative performance settings. It managed slightly under two hours with regular WiFi use and high processor usage. . The Vaio P is available in red, green, black and white and retails from $1,299. http://www.todayonline.com/articles/308513.asp