Sony sold off its Vaio laptop and tablet PC business at the start of this year, but the Vaio name isn’t dead and gone. There’s a new tablet PC prototype doing the rounds, and from the little we’ve seen it looks beautiful.
Showcased in the spin-off company’s online magazine, the Vaio Prototype Tablet PC uses a quad-core Intel Core i7 Haswell processor with integrated Iris Pro HD 5200 graphics, displaying through a 12.3-inch 2560×1704 pixel display with a 3:2 aspect ratio screen — very similar to the brilliant Surface Pro 3 from Microsoft.
The page itself is in Japanese, but even if you just look at the pictures or do a little creative Google Translating, you’ll see that the prototype is clean, simple, well built and attractive — sensibly so seeing as it looks like it’s aimed at serious creative professionals, and those that have a little extra cash to splash around. It’s like a Lenovo ThinkPad met a Vaio Tap in a dark alley and things happened.
The Wall Street Journal suggests that if the tablet prototype ever made it to market, it would cost around 200,000 yen, or around $2100 — commensurate with the Vaio’s high-end specs, and squarely in competition with other premium convertible tablets. That fold out stand, that digitiser pen, and that detachable Bluetooth keyboard, though — this is a tablet that might tear our minds away from clicking the purchase button on a Surface Pro 3. [VAIO]