Leave it to Sony to decide that the main thing missing from the actually quite healthy netbook market is a four-digit price tag.
The Vaio P699E, part of the new Signature collection of luxury laptops with exotic cases, has a regular Intel processor but in other respects stacks up solidly as a netbook. The screen is a petite 8 inches, storage is all flash-based and it weighs in at svelte 1.4 pounds.
Decidedly un-netbookish, however, is the $2,000 price tag. That compares with $1,000 for regular versions of the P series, which seem to difffer only in lacking a shell made of "glossy black" something.