Sony pushes reliability in Vaio laptops

Firm wants a larger chunk of business laptop pie

Sonyhas officially launched its Vaio Professional range of laptops and value-added services aimed at business users. The company said it intends to take a larger share of the business market by focusing on reliability, and service and support.
Vaio Professional centres on the newly launched BX, TX and S series of Vaio laptops, which come with a three-year warranty and dedicated customer support hotline. Firms can additionally purchase next-business-day on-site support to cover up to 50 Vaio systems against failure.
Sony UK's group IT product manager, Colin Woodward, said that while rival laptop makers are competing on price, Sony would focus on adding value through reliability and support.
"Price is an important factor for buyers, but reliability drives down the lifetime cost. Using quality components cuts down the failure rate," he said. Sony cited the case of the Business School of Birmingham University, which standardised on Vaios last year and had not had a single hardware fault in 12 months.
The Vaio Professional models include the BX series, which is fully configurable to make life easier for professional users, Sony said. These come with an integrated fingerprint scanner and Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip for security, and screen sizes up to 17in. All BX models have common accessories including docking station.
Other models include the TX series ultra-portables, which have carbon fibre and carbon composite materials to toughen their casing. TX models have 11.1in screens and battery life up to 12 hours, according to Sony.