Sony announces AR series VAIO – world's first Blu-ray notebook

This morning I wondered what the mysterious AR Digital
Studio was when it appeared alongside the new UX Micro on Sony’s viral
advertisement page. Now we are lucky enough to have a full set of specs for the
brand new AR series of VAIO notebooks, described by Sony as "The Ultimate HD Entertainment Notebook" and with good reason. 

First and foremost, this is the first laptop ever to be
blessed with Blu-ray and full HD capture, editing and playback capabilities; it
also has an HDMI output which presumably means it can connect to an HD Ready TV
to provide fully HDCP compliant High Definition viewing.

Other specs consist of a new Core Duo processor and NVIDIA
GeForce GPU, both of which you’ll be using heavily if you’re try and edit HD
films with one of these. To store all that video data you’ll be managing. Writing
to Blu-ray is also an important part of this notebook so you have an integrated
double layer Blu-ray Disc optical drive to play with.

The screen is an X-Black, 17-inch WideUltraXGA2 screen
capable of playing full HD resolution video, to the maximum possible resolution
of 1080. Of course you could just use it to watch telly using the integrated digital-analogue
combination receiver.

The price of these notebook sized bits of computing
awesomeness is yet to be revealed but I think ‘stellar’ might prove a realistic
description. Also still a mystery are the exact dimensions – with all that kit
inside it could prove to be a bit of hefty beast but that would be most unlike
Sony.

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