Vaio Z and Z Canvas Ultrabooks officially announced

VAIO, the laptop brand which used to be owned by Sony, announced yesterday two new Ultrabooks. The Vaio Z is an acrobatic slim Ultrabook that can be used in multiple viewing modes, while the screen of the VAIO Z Canvas can be completely separated from the keyboard, resulting in a fully-featured Windows tablet.

Mihai Andrici, Published 02/17/2015

Ultrabook

About a year ago in February 2014, Sony announced that it will sell the VAIO notebook division to Japan Industrial Partners (JIP), a move that was allegedly needed to allow a better focus on smartphones and tablets. Today, the former Sony brand made its return to the notebook market by announcing two new Ultrabooks.

The two new Vaio notebooks are called the Vaio Z and the Vaio Z Canvas, with the letter Z standing for "Zero", a new beginning for the brand. The Vaio Z comes with specs such as a 13.3-inch display, a SSD that can boot the device from standby in 0.3 seconds, either an Intel Core i5 or a Core i7 processor from the Broadwell generation, as well as a battery life of about 15.5 hours. As far as the design is concerned, the main highlight of the Vaio Z is a special hinge that allows the user to fold the notebook into a "tablet mode". The Vaio Z laptop acrobatics won't come cheap, as the price is set at a whopping $1600.

The second new notebook from Vaio is the Vaio Z Canvas, an Ultrabook that comes with specs such as a 12.1-inch display with a resolution of 2560 by 1704 pixels, a digitizer, and up to 1TB of internal storage. The Vaio Z Canvas is basically a 2-in-1 convertible, as the display can be fully detached from the keyboard and used as a standalone tablet. The two new Ultrabooks will be launched in May.