Teaching, Technology, and Learning

I purchased a Sony Vaio P several weeks ago and have been enjoying it quite a bit. It's my favorite computer for meetings or trips when I have a table or desk available (for no desk, I still use my OQO 02, but it hasn't gotten much action lately).

The Sony Vaio P series was unveiled at CES in January 2009 and is essentially Sony's entry in the netbook market. I won't go into specs or the typical things you'd find in a review, because you can google the machine and find many excellent reviews already. I purchased the "peridot" green machine (since I'm a little tired of black/white laptops) with hard disk drive and extended battery.

A few comments I've gotten:

"Wow, you are getting smaller machines every day" (actually not quite true, this is much bigger than the OQO)

"That's small enough to fit into your purse" (to which I correct, "you mean my man bag")

"How much does that cost?"

So why do I like this machine? First, it's really light and easy to carry around. I just leave the machine in sleep most of the time and it only takes a few seconds to come out of sleep. Second, it's got the ridiculously awesome resolution of 1600x768 pixels on an 8" screen. This makes the default font too tiny to read in my opinion, but it's easy to adjust the DPI or view apps at a larger percentage to get readable fonts. Third, the machine is very pleasant to type on. At 90% of a full keyboard, I find I can type at about 95 wpm when I average around 120 wpm on a full keyboard. Fourth, with the extra capacity battery, I can stretch the machine out to 6 hours of battery life, long enough to make it through a full day of meetings for me. Fifth, the machine uses passive cooling so it is really quiet. This is a nice change from my OQO 02, which sounds like a miniature hairdryer at times and was quite an annoyance in meeting rooms to the other participants and embarrassing to myself.

Where I normally don't use this machine is with teaching. I still love my tablet to deliver lectures to my class. In a pinch though, the Vaio P would be fine for a powerpoint presentation or something but with no pen capabilities it's not nearly as flexible as my tablet.

Here are two scenarios where I recently used my Vaio P. Yesterday, I had three meetings: from 10-11, 11:30-1:00, and 2:00-5:00. That's five and a half hours of meetings. At the 2-5 meeeting people have to arrive early to fight for the coveted spots near a power outlet. With my Vaio P though I was able to make it through the whole day (with the machine sleeping between meetings) without plugging in! It's strangely empowering to not have to be dependent on a power outlet the whole day. I did have to turn off my radios and the screen brightness down a bit near the end of the last meeting, but I still did have about 15% battery life left.

The other scenario using my Vaio P is today, which is a Saturday. I drove my 6 year old to his Kung Fu lesson and let him check out our route on the map in real time using the built-in GPS on the Vaio P. While he was doing his thing at his Kung Fu lesson I went next door to a coffee shop with my Vaio P, got a tasty beverage, logged on to Blackboard via wifi, and finished grading a few assigments. Next I logged into my blog and typed this post!

For me, I couldn't use the Vaio P as my primary computing device. It's too slow for things like video and I need pen input for teaching. As a companion device though for meetings and trips I really enjoy it. My configuration with the extended battery costs about $1000 which makes it quite a bit more expensive than other netbooks, but so far the investment has been worth it to me.