Now I have had my Sony UX180P for about a week now and am still learning all the things it can do. When it first arrived my initial thoughts were Wow!

It’s just so tiny about the size of a PSP. I bought it primarily because I am a man who likes to travel light. When I go away I still want to be able to keep in touch with the world and keep an eye on my websites and email. My previous sub-notebook was a Flybook which served me well but when I originally bought it on Ebay from a German seller it never crossed my mind that it would come with a German keyboard and Windows XP in German. For the most part that wasn’t too much of a problem as I installed a fresh copy of Windows XP on it and set the keyboard to English. There aren’t too many differences and if you use a keyboard often enough you get to know where all the keys are. It is only the special characters I have a hard time finding sometimes.

Anyway, back to the Sony, the first thing you notice is the screen. It is just amazing and although it is a tiny 4 inches it is so clear there is no problem reading it at all. They do provide zoom buttons to enlarge what you are viewing but honestly I haven’t found them necessary.

Its also so bright that you can use this pc just about anywhere except for in direct bright sunlight. This is something that I was never able to do with my Flybook. Even in a bright sunny room indoors you wouldn’t be able to see the screen.

I wouldn’t recommend using this as your only pc or even only laptop if you need to do a lot of typing as you can imagine the keyboard is only just big enough to type with two fingers or thumbs and will slow you down considerably. I know you could use an external keyboard but that really defeats the object of an ultra-portable pc. The other option albeit still slow is to do what I’m doing now and use some handwriting recognition software. I am using EverNote’s ritePen 2.5 which works really well.

I managed to get the Cingular Edge card unlocked so can use it with a UK network card and with the built in wireless I am able to connect into my home network and hotspots without any trouble.

The test of time will be once this Sony UX180P has lost its initial novelty factor. I am pretty confident I’ll be using it regularly way after that happens. I’m still learning what all the buttons do and once I’ve figured it all out and been using it a while I’ll give an honest opinion to what I really think to it in an everyday world.

Posted in Gadgets