(Credit: Sony)

Amid the parade of Sony products announced this morning, it might be easy to get lost in the crowd–unless you happen to be clad in floral patterns of bright pink and blue.

That’s how Sony’s Vaio laptops tried to stand apart, anyway, in the latest iteration of its “Graphic Splash Expression Collection.” Despite the ornate names of the newest crop–which include “Victorian Lace” and “Flora”–it’s actually quite subdued compared with earlier releases that boasted leopard prints and giant polka dots.

The patterns and colors can be mixed and matched, and personal engraving is free for the 1,200 laptops in this limited edition. But perhaps its most distinguishing aspect is under the hood: The keyboards can be customized with three new designer fonts. Other than that, the 15.4-inch widescreen laptops have the usual run of Vaio specs and options.

Tags: APPLE, GOOGLE, Intel, SONY

The MacBook Air, unfurled today, might be the thinnest notebook on the market today, but it’s not the thinnest of all time.

That distinction belongs to the Pedion, an ill-fated notebook developed by Mitsubishi and Hewlett-Packard back in 1997.The Pedion measured 18.4 millimeters thick, which comes out to 0.7244 inch thick. Although the Air gets to 0.16 inch at the thinnest point, the Air is 0.76 inch thick at the beefiest portion, making it minutely thicker. Mitsubishi released the Pedion in early 1998.

The Pedion, however, wasn’t exactly the paragon of quality or value. The $6,000 notebook came with 64MB of memory and a 1GB hard drive. The notebook came with a magnesium case to make it sturdy. Even with that, though, consumers quickly reported mechanical and other problems. Mitsubishi subsequently withdrew the notebook from the market. (HP never came out with its version, I don’t think. I’ll check.) The name probably didn’t help either. “Attention Circuit City employees. I have a Pedion on aisle one.”

Apple calls the Air the world’s thinnest notebook. How you interpret that (”on the market today” or “ever”) is up to you.

Others have come close but not limboed under. A special-edition Sony Vaio X505 sold back in 2004 comes close to the Air. The notebook, issued in limited numbers to commemorate the Vaio line, measured 0.8 inch thick at the fattest point and 0.38 inch at the thinnest. Part of the shell was made of carbon fiber for strength. Read more »

A new notebook accessory capitalises on the Wifi radiation scare by claiming to protect men where they may think it matters most.

The £19.99 Lapgard is a laminated leather-look pad that fits under a notebook to protect your marriage prospects.

Blurb on the product from vendor Amps states categorically: “Wifi brings added danger to laptop use.”

This is far from an established fact, as the BBC was forced to admit recently when it backtracked over an alarmist Panorama programme on the subject. There is no evidence of radiation danger from Wifi - though, as with mobile phones, the technology is so new that any long-term effects will not yet be apparent.

The Lapgard blurb also states that as a man’s “lap” may be just 2cm from a notebook Wifi transmitter, his marriage prospects are receiving radiation of a similar level to what the brain gets from mobile phones.

This will depend very much on the design of the notebook and its aerials, which can focus radiated energy towards the nearest base station; also radiation drops off with the square of the distance, so small differences in range can affect levels.

Less controversially the Lapgard is said to prevent your lap getting too hot, or worse. The box cites the case of a Swedish scientist who in 2002 burned his private parts by using his laptop on his lap for an hour, according to a letter in the medical journal The Lancet.

The Lapgard, which comes in four sizes for notebooks with screens measuring between 12in and 15in, does seem smarter and lighter than some similar products that have hit the market.

Tags: Microsoft, PROGRAMMING, LINUX/UNIX, COMPUTER