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!

First off, Sony revised their larger screen approach, dropping it’s widescreen size from 4.3 inches to 3.8 inches.  This screen size change may make the device more portable, but some worry that it will affect it’s video viewing capability.

The new PSP is much smaller, and 43% lighter than it’s previous incantations.  This makes the device much more portable, yet it holds a new inbuilt 16Gb of flash memory. If this is not enough for your portable pleasures then it also has a memory slot to extend your storage requirements.

While the controls of the PSP Go closely resemble that of the PSP standard, it may seem a little cramped for some people, infact the smaller form of the new PSP Go make it more awkward in many ways.  In some ways it feels like the Sony PSP Go is not so much the next generation PSP, rather a competitor to the iPod touch, without the touch screen.

The PSP Go has all the previous wireless capability of the PSP, with inbuilt WiFi.  on top of this though the PSP Go has bluetooth capability, for wireless headsets and the like.  This does also however mean that you can hook the device up to a 3G enabled phone, or a PS3 controller. However how you would see the PSP Go screen while holding a PS3 controller is yet to be explained!

Sony have been developing new title for the PSP Go from many of its most popular brands, including Metal Gear Solid and Gran Turismo.  These are showing some great promise, but if these fail to disappoint then you can get many titles over the PSP Download service (Via WiFi).

While the PSP Go has several interesting features, people do have some questions over why Sony have not integrated any telephony or even voip features to give it a chance to compete with the iPhone.

In an increasing trend from Sony this device has become available in Europe before the states, done in principal to avoid the cheap export of these Items to other countries.

Personally I quite like the Sony Bravia DAV-F200, it looks fantastic, avoids the clutter of surround sound speakers and according to the write-ups performs exceptionally well.  It plays HDMI video quality DVDs, a kind of semi-HD DVD quality that is fairly commonplace now.

The great thing about this Sony Bravia DAV-F200 is that is packs so much punch ionto such a little space, these units are tiny, and yet with positioning can beat nearly any other home theatre system out there.  The downside, like most SOny products is a quite hefty price tag.