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The story
After news broke of an ultra-compact, high-performance PC small enough to fit in a back pocket, a thread on 5ch’s “Morning Coffee” board (Hello! Project board) filled up with nostalgic comments about UMPCs (ultra-mobile PCs) — the VAIO U and P series, Toshiba’s Libretto, IBM’s PC110, and other tiny machines that domestic manufacturers once raced to produce before smartphones took over. At the same time, some pointed out that “VAIO was sold off by Sony” and questioned whether there’s even demand for a PC this size nowadays, making the thread a mix of nostalgia and down-to-earth skepticism about demand.
What people said
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DELL
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Want it
UMPCs faded into the background once smartphones showed up,
but now small form factors are making a comeback as gaming PCs.
Don't even need an HDD or optical drive — palm-sized would be fine.
Makes you want one even if you'd never use it.
UMPCs are probably only going to survive as handheld gaming PCs.
VAIO was a failure.
Sony already sold it off.
and wanted one of these instead of a smartphone — stop digging up my embarrassing past! ("black history"/黒歴史 = Japanese slang for a cringe-inducing past)
Touchscreen laptops are out there,
but I don't need a keyboard.
bet not even this board's old-school regulars (the "Wolf" crowd) would recognize it.
IBM's was the Chandra, by the way (the PC110's internal codename).
I wanted a Libretto.
IBM actually released the PC110 (nicknamed the "Ultraman PC") before the Libretto.
There's probably a steady niche it appeals to.
Personally an iPhone's enough for me since I just need a browser and a few mobile apps.
Anything more and I'd reach for a laptop.
A laptop's more like a kei car (Japan's compact "light" vehicles) — might as well just buy that instead.
They work great as handheld gaming PCs.
I haven't used Intel in about 10 years — how are they these days?
It's an old PC, so the text's probably bigger than on today's phones anyway.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
UMPCs (Ultra Mobile PCs) were a category domestic Japanese manufacturers competed fiercely in during the early 2000s, before smartphones took over — well-known examples include the VAIO U/P series, Toshiba’s Libretto, and IBM’s PC110 (nicknamed the “Ultraman PC”). One claim raised in the thread, that “VAIO failed and Sony sold off the business,” is in fact true: the VAIO business was transferred to Japan Industrial Partners in 2014, and the current “VAIO Corporation” is a separate company from Sony itself. Without knowing this background, it’s easy to conflate nostalgia for old VAIOs with discussion of Sony’s current products. Where opinions in the thread diverged was over future demand — one camp argued “a smartphone is enough,” while another countered that “improvements in integrated GPU performance are bringing these back as handheld gaming PCs.”
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hello! Project board) thread “[URGENT] Sony, the pride of Japan, known the world over, finally releases an ultra-compact high-performance PC that fits in your back pocket wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.”
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