A review by Jonathan Blum on TheStreet.com of Sony's new Vaio UX 180P.  He states some interesting points about Sony's brand slowly diminishing. 

Another interesting point from his review..=)

"The sliding 4 1/2 inch screen looked better and better the more I used it. I downloaded Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang from CinemaNow to test the screen. (Get over it, Jobs. CinemaNow, not iTunes, is the place to get the best-looking content.) "

Yes this post may seem a little narcissistic, but I'm proud of what we have built.

http://www.thestreet.com/_googlen/funds/goodlife/10295241.html?cm_ven=GOOGLEN&cm_cat=FREE&cm_ite=NA

Sony (SNE - commentary - Cramer's Take) is an electronics behemoth after my own heart: confused, disorganized and wasteful, but ultimately reliable.

No matter what the market does, Sony sticks to its gadget-making guns and refuses to turn out schlock. High profits will follow high design, the company reasons. Bravo, Sony.

But for now, Sony's corporate ship is taking on water. Rivals Samsung, BenQ, Microsoft (MSFT - commentary - Cramer's Take) and others are beating Sony at its own game: Their Blu-ray disc players or gaming units are shipping now, while Sony misses delivery date after delivery date.

The brand is taking a dinger, too. Branding consultancy Interbrand said Sony slipped out of the top 20 corporate brands worldwide in 2005, replaced by the once-lowly Samsung. Ouch.

But underneath the chaos, Sony's products are packed with clever design and unexpected functionality. Take the Vaio UX 180P, for instance.

Sony bills this thing as a micro PC, which it is ... I think.

At about the size of any ubiquitous corporate achievement award -- 6 x 4 inches and weighing in at a pound and a half -- the UX is hardly a fit-in-the-pocket personal data assistant.

The unit may be too big, but the screen is too small -- only 4 1/2 inches wide. The UX runs the real Windows XP operating system and all modern applications, but you'd hardly know it. This screen renders fonts that are, no kidding, the size of the nutritional information on the side of a One-A-Day vitamin package. Tiny doesn't even begin to cover it.

And then there is the mouse, a touch-sensitive pointer the size of a pencil eraser. Honestly, the pointer was as hard to control as any device I have ever handled. Pointing and clicking on first use was like driving drunk at the Indy 500.

And all this for a list price of $1,799? Someone would have to be crazy to buy one. The Vaio UX seems to be yet another wacked-out gadget from poor dowdy Sony. Corporate Tourette's syndrome has clearly been setting in hard in Tokyo.

But wait.

I still wasn't ready to give up. I fiddled and fussed. And I learned. The more time I spent with the UX, the more I sensed a greater design.

As clunky as the unit was as a PDA, the UX was surprisingly svelte if viewed as a modular laptop. The PC was lovely to hold and sturdily made -- burnished alloy and nice black plastic.

The sliding 4 1/2 inch screen looked better and better the more I used it. I downloaded Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang from CinemaNow to test the screen. (Get over it, Jobs. CinemaNow, not iTunes, is the place to get the best-looking content.)

Black, the usual bane of liquid-crystal imagery, was spectacular on the UX. Flesh tones were balanced. Off-angle viewing was excellent. I had to bring the UX outside in blistering daylight to get the thing to wash out. Impressive.

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-Jesse