Sony's $900 Ultra Portable Vaio P Gets XP ...Finally

Sony has finally decided to ditch Vista and will ship the latest model of the Vaio P Series with XP.

When we saw Sony’s Vaio P Series at CES, we didn’t really have enough to go on to make a real decision as to whether or not we liked it. When more details were announced, we had mixed feelings. Pleased with the specs (for the most part), but the price and OS confused us.

Packing a 60 GB HDD, the ultra portable ships for $899.99 with Vista Home Basic (don’t forget it’s dual-boot to XMB). Models go up in price from there, with options for SSDs ranging from 64 GB to 128 GB and an upgrade to Vista Home Premium. The $900 price-tag aside, lots of people wondered what Sony was thinking shipping the machine with Vista. As much as the company kept telling us “this is not a netbook” preferring to call it an ultra-portable instead, the last thing an ultra-portable needs is an OS that’s going to bog down the machine’s already modest specs. 

Engadget today reports that Sony is finally making XP a standard load on its new VAIO P model VGN-P50. Starting June 6th, Sony’s Japanese customers will also see a 2GHz Atom Z550 processor bump in addition to WWAN data as standard and an option for a 256GB SSD. No word if we’ll see the same options in the U.S. or not.