Sony announces VAIO SA series ultraportable, puts VAIO F series up for pre-order

Having trouble keeping Sony's slim VAIO S series laptops straight? It's okay, we are, too, especially now that the company's officially unveiled the SA series, a 13.3-inch ultraportable that's poised to go toe to toe with the skinny Lenovo ThinkPad X1. Although it's got almost the same magnesium-and-alloy chassis as the VAIO SB series we saw at CES, the SA is a hair thinner, at 0.95 inches, and comes standard with AMD Radeon HD 6630 graphics and 1GB of video memory, 1600 x 900 resolution, a 500GB hard drive, fingerprint reader, and a Blu-ray drive. You can also trick it out with a dual channel solid-state drive, which promises to help let you work up to 16 hours unplugged if you combine it with a $100 sheet battery. If you fork out a minimum of $1,650, you can snag one with an SSD.

If the SA's $1,350 starting price is more than you're willing to spend, there's still the SB series, though the $999 base model naturally has less impressive specs, including 512MB of video memory, 1366 x 768 resolution, a DVD player, and a Core i5 -- not Core i7 -- processor. For what its worth, its color options now include pink and navy, if that floats your boat more than the high-end SA's black, silver, and brown palette.

In other news, Sony's also taking orders for the VAIO F Series, which comes in two flavors: one with a 16-inch 3D display with a 2D-to-3D conversion button, starting at $1,840, and a 16.4-inch 2D model with a more modest $1,100 base price. But if you want a 2D display with 1080p resolution and a Blu-ray drive, you can expect to pay at least $1,125. Both these and the SA series are up for pre-order today, with gussied-up photos below and full PR and past the break.

Sony VAIO SA series

Sony VAIO F series

SonyStyle (F Series), SonyStyle (S Series)

Toshiba's tablet-ready, glasses-free 3D display debuts at SID 2011 (video)

The T-Mobile G-Slate may have a jump on the (red and cyan) 3D tablet market, but we can do better, and while strolling past Toshiba's SID 2011 setup, we may have found the slate of the future's killer component: an 8-inch, glasses-free 3D display. Tablet sized? Yes, indeed. We couldn't get a Toshiba representative to admit the depth perceptive display was destined for any upcoming devices, but we were told that the screen certainly "made sense" for a tablet device. The technology seems to be designed with a smaller form factor in mind, as the firm warned that larger versions of the screen, while possible, would suffer a drop in image quality. At 8-inches however, it looks mighty fine -- although you'll still need to look on from a centered sweet-spot to catch the 3D effect, a plague it shares with its glasses-free brethren. Check out our hands-on video (sans 3D, of course) after the break.

Toshiba's 8-inch glasses-free 3D display eyes-on at SID 2011