At Computex 2013 Sony is refreshing its Vaio Duo hybrid which is a tablet PC that can slide out to become a laptop. The new design improves upon the previous generation in significant ways. First, the overall design is thinner, slicker, better. If Sony wants users to see this as a tablet, it can’t be too thick. Obviously, we are talking about a slate/tablet PC here, not about something like the Nexus 10.
In the professional market, I have seen a number of users who want the “social” aspect of using a tablet (sharing, hands-on demonstrations, sales..) but also have a real, productive computer when they are not with colleagues/clients. The Sony Duo pretty much addresses this in a rather elegant way, but let’s be realistic: this is more a PC than a tablet and I suspect that professionals are the main audience for this design.
Sony has integrated a 1080p display which should look nice and sharp on this 13″ computer. Sony says that its TRILUMINOS Display can render more colors than competitors. We are very curious to see it in action. The Vaio Duo has the particularity of supporting a digitizer and assuming that it works with Photoshop, this could be a prime feature for designers who want to be creative on the go. The Microsoft Surface Pro was at top of the list of many designers for this exact reason, but unfortunately Photoshop CS doesn’t support the pressure-sensitiveness on that hardware, yet.
We don’t have the full specifications, but at this moment, Sony says that the Vaio Duo tablet/laptop can stay up for 10 hours. We assume that this number comes from the standard battery depletion test named MobileMark. Other than that, we know that the Duo can be configured with up to the latest 4th Gen Core i7 processor from Intel and that its pricing will start at $1399 on June 9th. More specs to come…
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