Sony's Vaio VGN-UX1XN, announced in January, sounds too good to be true; it is a handheld PC that is capable of running Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. After a long wait, I have finally got hold of one to try out.

The first thing that strikes you is how chunky the device is; it is like holding a professional SLR film camera in your hands. Secondly, while the screen is tiny (measuring 4.5in diagonally) it is beautifully bright and clear.  Even so, I wouldn't like to have to use this small a screen for any length of time, especially at its default resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels.

Sony has packed with the device with applications that all try to start at boot-up, including Norton Internet Security Center and Upek protector suite. Consequently, the device feels sluggish, despite having 1GB of memory and a 32GB Flash hard drive, which ought to give it the edge over other portables equipped with a spinning hard disk. Removing some of these from memory improves the situation somewhat.

One immediate problem I found with the Vaio is that some of Vista's dialog boxes are too big to fit on the screen, and cannot be resized. The upshot is that buttons at the bottom of the dialog are off the bottom of the screen and cannot be clicked with the mouse (see screenshot). Moving the dialog box does not help, as the mouse pointer reaches the top of the screen before the buttons come into view.

Underneath the slide-up display is a full qwerty keyboard. This is inevitably a bit of a compromise, with tiny calculator-like keys that don't provide much feedback.

The Vaio ships with a cradle that enables it to be used with a desktop keyboard, mouse and monitor. In this configuration it can display a more useful 1280 x 1024 pixels.

It is also supposed to come with a dongle that lets the device plug into a projector. This was missing from our review unit, but this facility could make the UX1 attractive to travelling sales executives for customer presentations.

A full review of the Sony Vaio UX1 will appear in a future issue of IT Week.