Over the weekend, a giveaway promotion on Sony's New Zealand website clearly states the company plans to unveil new, and probably vastly improved, Vaio notebook computers during CES week next month. That's all the site says, of course, but one feature dragging down the usefulness and practicality of so-called ultralight notebooks has been the external hard drive that dangles off the side like a ball and chain. A solid-state disk would enable 1) drastic weight and form factor reductions; 2) power savings; and 3) significantly faster boot times. It would not enable cost savings, although one of SSD's other historic tradeoffs -- high sustained transfer rates, especially at the speed necessary for HD video -- appears to have been reconciled in recent months.

Source:→ BetaNews