Apparently, four reports of adaptors short circuiting has alerted Sony to a weakness in the insulation, which could pose a shock hazard. So far, no one has been injured, but if you happen to have one of these adaptors, you can contact Sony for a replacement. [CPSC]

The reviewers found that the thinness comes with some drawbacks, namely heat. Everything is packed so tightly inside the VAIO X that it gets way-more-than-warm-to-the-touch pretty quickly. Luckily, the 6-cell battery raises the laptop off of the user’s lap and helps solve the problem. But if you’re going to use the 4-cell battery, better bring a heat shield for your legs.

Speaking of batteries, Sony worked some power management voodoo on this thing. According to Laptop Mag’s tests, the thing runs for 9 hours and 49 minutes, way longer than the average 6-cell running time of 6 hours and 10 minutes.

Head on over to Laptop Mag to get their full impressions. [Laptop Mag via mspoonauer]

However, the most notable feature is definitely that the PC portion of the system can be turned off, allowing you to only power the device solely as an LCD monitor (should you just want to play on your console or something). For those of us living in already tight quarters, knowing that your all-in-one can also be your TV (and not just for Sony’s built-in DVR, Blu-ray player or, of course, steaming video) is extremely handy. [Sony via Engadget]

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.

While many TV makers are using polarized glasses in their 3D concepts, Sony’s plans involve high-definition active shutter glasses that alternate the image for the left and right eye. Hopefully they won’t make me cross-eyed like my old 3DFX Voodoo shutters did. [Sony]

The guys at NetbookNews say there is talk of it having an Intel Atom processor rather than a Intel ULV processor. Either way, Sony has been touting crazy battery life (even though the battery doesn’t seem to be replaceable) in the 0.68kg laptop.

Now it would be typical of Sony to jack up the price on this baby, but I am thinking it might not be as high as some think. Don’t forget Sony was saying a few months ago it wants to enter the low cost ultraportable space. Either way, our sources tell us this sweet lappie will launch sometime in October with Windows 7. [Netbook News]

That’s despite the fact that the Intel Core 2 Duo processors that they use support Intel’s Virtual Technology (VT), which is needed to run the Windows XP Mode included in Windows 7 Pro and above. Of course, many users have been looking forward to Windows 7’s XP Mode because it allows software designed for XP to run without breaking like it might in Vista.

Over at the Windows 7 blog, Sony’s Senior manager for product marketing, Xavier Lauwaert, responded that it had:

…received very little if any requests to enable VT technology up until very recently.
In addition, our engineers and QA people were very concerned that enabling VT would expose our systems to malicious code that could go very deep in the Operating System structure of the PC and completely disable the latter.

For these two reasons we have decided, until recently, not to enable VT.
However, with the advent of XP Virtualization, there is impetus for us to relook at the situation and I can share with you that we will enable VT on select models.

Though, I fear to say that the Z series will not be part of our VT-enabling effort. Indeed, we will focus on more recent models.

Some good news: There are online guides that claim to run through re-enabling hardware virtualisation on models that use either a Phoenix BIOS, or the Insyde H2O UEFI framework (like the Vaio Z). [The Register via Engadget]