Sony Vaio CS series laptops: Beautifully ill-conceived

Sony has announced a gaggle of new 14.1-inch laptops this month, including the shiny, consumer-focused CS series. Like the CR series that came before it, it comes in a variety of colours and configurations for your looking and, er, configuring pleasure.

Red, pink, white, brown, silver and black are available, all of which look pretty hot. The pink, white and black models all cost £899 and have an identical specification: a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 4GB of RAM, 320GB hard drive, Nvidia GeForce 9300M GS graphics, 802.11a,b,g,n Wi-Fi, webcam and DVD rewriter drive.

The brown and 'spicy red' versions are arguably the most interesting of the bunch, primarily because they come with Blu-ray combo drives instead of the DVD rewriter in the others. The bad news is their screens -- like the screens on the other colours, they only support a native resolution of 1,440x800 pixels, so you can't enjoy full 1080p Blu-ray goodness.

Oddly, Sony hasn't even bothered fitting them with a digital video output port, so you can't pipe the video signal to a 'full HD' TV -- all you get is bog-standard D-Sub. £100 isn't much to ask for Blu-ray functionality, but the fact you can't make the most of it means there's almost no point buying these models over the others. Unless you really like red or brown.

All are available to buy now via the SonyStyle Web site. Take a look at the pictures we took and let us know what you think. -Rory Reid