First Sony Store Opens in Los Angeles

As we reported earlier Sony has come through and announced its first ever Sony Store that recently opened its doors in Los Angeles, California (Century City). Following the success and lusciousness of recently opened Sony Store in Nagoya, Japan, the new LA store will bring a totally new experience that customers will be pleasantly surprised with. The overabundance of Sony products will allow customers to play around, experiment as well as witness some future technologies that are still to come (you won’t see the hybrid VAIO or a Sony branded tablet just yet). The openness and spaciousness is definitely a huge improvement over the current SonyStyle stores, and hopefully the future roll out of this venture will follow the trend. Pretty much all 29 current SonyStyle stores will be simply re-branded and remodeled to Sony Stores and possibly move to bigger spaces at the malls, however there were quite a few of those stores that were recently closed for good. So even though the Style is going to be gone in the wording, it looks like it is far from being gone in the philosophy and aesthetics of the new stores to come.  We will probably see a new website name as well that will replace sonystyle.com as a shopping online destination.

If you are in LA, definitely pay a visit to this new store as you may end to win cool prizes. Check out the latest blog post and view a video above where SGNL host takes you around the store.

Here is another video of Sony USA executive introducing the store:

Exclusive: New VAIO Hybrid PC and VAIO Chrome Coming This Summer

Sony has always been known for its ingenuity and amazing design in hardware but most of us may have noticed recently that we have not seen anything ground breaking and extraordinary from the company. Engadget recently unearthed some info about about the upcoming Sony tablet supposedly featuring PlayStation certification as a “full blown media and gaming tablet” , however Sony has some more goodies cooking in their kitchen as we speak.

So, there this interesting VAIO Hybrid PC and the reason why it is a hybrid is it consists of two components. Yes, there is an actual notebook that will be pretty thin, featuring Intel’s Light Peak technology which is what we know now as Thunderbolt, that same interface that current MacBooks Pro are sporting.

Just to tease you a little bit with the hardware specs, you will be presented with and Intel Wireless Display, SSD of hard drive flavor, i7 processor, no optical drive, HDMI output with 3D support, expect battery life to run from 8 to 16.5 hours and the thing should weigh around 1.13 kg.

Now the second component/unit that’s what will be unique to this VAIO when connected, it will provide:

• Discrete GPU (AMD Whistler-XT with 1 GB VRAM)
• Blu-ray disc (reader/writer) drive
• HDMI Output
• VGA Output
• RJ45 Ethernet port
• USB
• weighing around 0.68kg

The connector is kind of funky and reminded me of VAIO DVD-RW i.Link plus power connector, only this time it looks like it’s gonna use USB and AC connection.

Overall the notebook looks pleasing to eyes, aesthetically designed in its VAIO fashion, however we are not quite sure about the purpose  of the second component. It again reminds me of a desktop model Sony marketed back in 2007 – VAIO RM series that featured a twin-unit form factor.

The next VAIO we unearthed is the VAIO with Chrome OS.

As Google is prepping its Chrome OS debut, Sony is hard at work to bring you their first VAIO pimped up in Google’s OS of course. Expect to see the following hardware specifications of this new PC:

• Nvidia Tegra 2 (250) platform
• 11.6″ (1366×768) LCD display
• 1 GB of Memory
• 16 GB eMMC (electronic multimedia card)
• Ultra-low power GeForce GPU
• Wireless WAN
• Wide Keyboard (18mm) will be pretty similar to the Google Chrome Cr-48 laptop keyboard
• Dimensions: less than an inch thick at around 19.9 mm; width is at 11.7″ (298 mm) and it is 21.5 cm (8.46″) deep
• It should weigh around 2.2 lb (or 1kg)
• 8 hour battery life

Features like Bluetooth and GPS will be enabled later on, so don’t expect those two right at launch in summer of 2011.

As far as the software department, you will love the Quick booting, Chrome OS auto-update will ensure you are always on top of new features and Sony will throw in some VAIO related software as well.

That is all for now guys, we will bring more info as it becomes available, sorry cannot post any actual pictures and I am not that great at drawings…Stay tuned though!

More Battlefield 3 Gameplay Footage

Last week EA/DICE released more in-game footage from the highly anticipated Battlefield 3, which is shaping up to be the best version of the game ever released. Check out our previous musings on Battlefield 3, which will be for PC, PS3, and XBOX360. I still play Battlefield: Bad Company 2 multiplayer (on PC) quite a bit..

The New VAIO S Emerges in the US…Finally

We saw the European release, wondered where the heck the Japanese VAIO SA/SB announcement was, as in history they used to break the news and create nice flashy web pages teasing the rest of the world – times have definitely changed.

Sony USA came out today and announced its introduction of VAIO S – the not-so-prototype but more of a teaser we saw at CES.  The SonyStyle is taking pre-orders and will let you customize the model by maximizing it and pimping it out with the latest and greatest. We’d say this model will definitely throw some punches against the new Macs and HPs you may see on the market. We customized to the max and ended up with a pretty nice configuration for $2269 with the following:

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