Sony Dash Personal Internet Viewer

The Sony Dash Personal Internet Viewer is the latest in a long line of random, useless, but surprisingly popular products, the like of which can only be beaten by luxury products such as the iPad.

The Sony Dash Personal Internet Viewer is pretty much just what it says. Sitting on the desk by your computer, or in the living room.  The Sony Dash Personal Internet Viewer packs quite a lot in to a small space

As well as hooking up to the Internet with it’s touch screen, the Sony Dash can also connect to things such as Pandora.

The main page is also pretty useful, allowing you to add widgits displaying the local weather, top news stories, and more.

Unfortunately I have a small problem with the Dash (Although no where near as much as the iPad), and that is, for the retail price of this device, why not just buy a cheap laptop?

While the Sony Dash at least has the reasonable release price of $199 dollars, still a bit excessive in my opinion for a dining room internet experience, that same money could easily go towards buying a fairly decent laptop, or simply buy outright a Netbook.

The iPad is a similar beast in my eyes, once you have bought all the software you need the Apple iPad can cost over $1000, you could get a top spec Laptop or Notebook for that amount of money, whereas the iPad barely contains any actual high spec hardware.

But I digress, the Sony Dash does have it’s place, and while it is not the best you can get for your money by any means, the Sony Dash does have a certain charm, and it’s intuitive touch screen is surprisingly easy to use.

The Dash does come with a pretty small screen, 7 inches, which is more than enough for checking the weather, but way too small for any real web browsing experience.

The Dash will be supposedly be able to play flash, and comes with a Netflix application.  However the real problem is that 7 inches is a bit small for watching video.

All in all the Sony Dash is a pretty nifty device, but if you are short on cash you might want to hold out for a little bit more functionality at a lower price!