Sony Announces VAIO NS and CS

September 12th, 2008 by Avram Piltch, LAPTOP Online Editorial Director

As vendors start gearing up for the holiday season, Sony has announced the release of two stylish consumer notebooks, the VAIO NS and CS, both available in fashion colors and with optional Blu-ray drives. The 15.4-inch VAIO NS will come in three colors: Nightfall Blue, Silk White, and Granite Silver, with a base model starting at $650 and a Blu-ray equipped configuration going for $1,000. The 14.1-inch VAIO CS will be available in four glossy finishes: sangria (red), dove (white), cosompolitan (pink), and black. There will also be a plain black matte finish available. Apart from its unique colors, the CS will have two other interesting design features:

A comfortable, stylish keyboard with extra spacing between the keys and a unique key font.
A tone analyzer that takes your music and turns it into a light show on the palm rest.

The CS will go for $920 without Blu-ray and $1,070 with. Both the CS and the NS come equipped with Sony’s proprietary XBRITE-ECO LCD screens, and feature Intel processors and chipsets. Sony also released specs for one CS model, the VGN-CS180J/R, and one NS model, the VGN-NS190J/L. Interestingly, both have a full 4GB of RAM and come with the 64-bit version of Vista Home Premium, which helps to avoid the notorious RAM limitation which prevents 32-bit versions of Vista from utilizing all four gigabytes of memory. VGN-CS180J/R Specs