That’s in part, because it is trick, since it has netbook guts and Sony’s asking you to pay $US1300 for it. But, in your hand, it makes you question how skinny is too skinny, how much weightlessness is an asset before it approaches nothingness. (The fatty VGA port very nearly destroys the illusion, though.) The effect still is remarkable, at least at first touch.

Sturdiness? It borders on feeling fragile, but never quite crosses that line. When you try to bend it, you definitely feel like there’s a breaking point that won’t require a ton of additional force on your part.

The keyboard layout is around 90% of full sized which is why it feels a little cramped, but I typed better than I expected, honestly, even with its tiny ticky-tacky keys about that fit the fingertips of a small child. The multitouch trackpad only supports zoom gestures—no two-finger scrolling—which are janky at best, at least inside of Internet Exploder. (Sub-question: Why can’t PC makers do a decent multitouch trackpad?)

Considering it’s a got 2GHz Atom chip, notching it a 2.4 Windows system rating on the one I messed with, it moved pretty decently, more nimbly than I’d have expected, even with Windows Media Center. This is mostly because of Windows 7 I suspect—with Vista it probably would’ve been tortuous.

Knowing that it’s running Atom inside, when it’s wrapped in feats of material and sensory goodness, definitely creates a sense of ambiguity, like Sony’s repeating the Vaio P all over again. Like it’s special effects. Except that it seems like it sorta kinda works this time, which is the actually weird part.

Aside from a few from MSI, all of these ultraportables are from ODMs, meaning they’re waiting for a larger company to snap them up and rebrand them (they’re ready to go to market now, so you could start seeing them very soon). But they’re all working prototypes and all very svelte and usable, with a focus on affordability. Sure, my 2009 MacBook Pro is very nearly as thin as a lot of these laptops, but it also cost twice as much. My favourite has to be the little white 10-incher with the blue flower design.

Occupying that perennially awkward space between a smartphone and a netbook, the mbook M1, like the Viliv S5, packs standard netbook components into a teeny space while remaining too large to be pocketable. It’s a nice enough design, and the price is fair, but the sacrifices made to keep the gadget small are sure to annoy owners. Everything’s been miniaturised: The headphone jack is a 2.5mm rather than the standard 3.5mm, and it includes only a mini-USB port, so you’ll need an adaptor for both audio and hardware input. Even the expansion slot has been miniaturised from the cheap and ubiquitous SDHC to micro-SDHC. The 16GB version will run you $599, and doubling your storage will cost an extra $250.

It includes the standard Windows XP, Intel Atom 1.33MHz proc, a 16/32GB SSD, and 512MB of memory, with a 4.8″ WVGA touchscreen at a reasonable 1024×600 resolution. In short, it’s just about exactly the same guts as the Viliv S5, except with a keyboard and without the standard-size ports. Tiny, yes, but if you’re not already pro-MID, the mbook M1 isn’t going to convince you. [Dynamism]

Despite Asus’ earlier announcement, Toshiba is the first manufacturer to bring a laptop with a 512GB SSD to market. The 12.1″ screened laptop also boasts a 12-hour battery in a svelte body. We want. Badly.

The Toshiba Dynabook SS-RX2, anchored with a Core 2 Duo proc, is less than 25mm thick and weighs less than 2.5 pounds. Disappointingly, it’s Japan-only for now, but we all hope it’ll make its way Stateside eventually. Get ready to cough up the green when it does; it costs over $US4,400 USD at the moment due to the prohibitively high (around $US1,500) cost of that huge SSD. But this baby, packed with Windows 7, might just be our dream ultraportable. [Product Page via Gizmodo Japan]

The two big chipmakers seem to think so. CNET’s sources at CES told them that the processor, which will be priced above the Atom but below the pricey ULV Core 2 Duos found in ultraportables and current thin laptops like the MacBook Air and Voodoo Envy 133, are “going to enable notebooks that are less than one inch (25mm) thick,” but that don’t cost as much as the aforementioned computers. The performance level will be commensurate with the price, give or take: significantly more powerful than the Atom, but by no means a flagship processor.

Details are scarce for the time being, but the processor seems to have an identical mission as AMD’s Neo: create an entirely category of laptop, designed like an ultraportable, but priced between a netbook and a notebook. Does anyone need this, or want this? HP’s 12-inch DV2 is the first of its kind, and by definition these new ultrathin laptops won’t deviate much from its precedents. If it doesn’t get your juices flowing, it’s doubtful that any of these new bridge machines will. [CNET via Engadget]

The processor is called the Athlon Neo, and it’s based on the previously-leaked Yukon platform. Compared to AMD’s current offerings, it is an evolutionary step: It’s smaller, media-oriented, and bundled with the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3410 video hardware, theoretically allowing for a reasonably un-crippled user experience. But the evolution is incremental, and this is by no mean an Atom equivalent. Nor is it intended to be.

AMD boasts that the Neo will easily drive full 1080p video, something that even nicely-screened netbooks simply don’t need. That’s because the Neo is intended for “ultrathin” notebooks, which the company claims will live comfortably between the low-end netbooks (remember the company’s snide “race to the bottom” comment?) and high-priced ultraportables.

HP was the first company to announce a Neo not-netbook, and it does indeed sit between a mini-note and an ultraportable (More on this here). It remains to be seen if that niche, which is being aggressively promoted as an entirely new class of laptop, will amount to anything more than needless moniker for a loose collection of confused products. [AMD]