New budget netbook the Sony Vaio M on its way

John Hillman. The Latest low cost netbook to hit the shelves has the Sony brand but, in such a crowded market, will that be enough to stand out from the crowd?

Sony is releasing a new budget netbook, the Sony Vaio M, which sports the latest Atom chips from Intel and will retail for around £300.

Rumoured to be available from the end of March, the M series will have its work cut out competing within a well established market. And on first glance there doesn’t appear to be much to set it apart from the competition.

It’s more expensive than the Acer Aspire One 751 (£230), cheaper than the HP Mini 311 (£359), and about the same as the Dell Mini 10 (£320). Specs-wise it’s pretty much on par with these three market leaders.

Your £300 will get you a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 Pine Trial processor, 1GB RAM, a 10.1 inch screen with LED display, webcam, card reader, WiFi and Bluetooth. All pretty standard.

Where it does stand up slightly taller than the rest is with a generous 250GB hard drive, giving you that little bit of extra storage space compared to its 160GB competitors.

So will it fly? Despite the crowded market and almost identical features to the others, the Sony Vaio M netbook does have one or two things going for it that could see it stake out some territory.

First and foremost it has the luxury of the Sony brand, which many people still find themselves drawn to as a marker of genuine quality. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, Sony has managed to cut a deal with Tesco, the supermarket giants.

With the Sony Vaio M available as an off the shelf purchase you have to say it has got a very good chance of muscling in on the netbook action. I mean, if they can turn Katie Price into a successful author…

Image credit: nDevilTV