Sony revamps its mobile range

And there's more…
The remainder of Sony's Brussels announcements were more consumer-orientated, but interesting nonetheless. Sitting at the centre of Sony's home networking plans is the new RA-series of desktops, the first representative of which, the RA104, is a very highly-specified beast. The RA104 is powered by a 3.6GHz Prescott-core Pentium 4 with 1GB of 400MHz DDR RAM, uses the new Grantsdale chipset, has 250GB of Serial-ATA hard disk storage and features PCI Express graphics courtesy of ATI's Radeon PCI Express X16 GPU. The DVD burner is a double-layer unit, capable of writing 8.5GB on a single disc. Connection to audio-visual equipment is provided by Sony''s Network Media Receiver augmented by an 802.11b/g adapter, with an access point attached to the PC. A TV tuner, Sony's GigaPocket PVR software and an electronic program guide courtesy of www.tvtv.com completes the picture. Sony also showed a prototype of the VAIO Pocket, a handheld hard disk-based audio/video player. After the obligatory intervention by the demo gremlins, Keiji Kimura, president of Sony's IT and Mobile Solutions Network Company, was able to demonstrate the VAIO Pocket downloading video content wirelessly from the RA104 and then playing it both standalone and wirelessly on a large flat-screen TV.