Walkmans, tools and flint spears

It was my own fault really. I have this urge whenever I walk past Dixons. I have to go in and pick an argument with the sales assistant who tries to sell me a widescreen TV.

The ones who think widescreen TV and widescreen films are the same kind of widescreen. Finally, I deliver the coup de grace: I tell them that a widescreen TV shows normal TV pictures much smaller than normal TVs.Then leaving the shattered assistant I go and look at the Walkmans.

I think Walkmans are a male thing. I was talking to a chum the other day who confessed to spending an hour staring in the window of a local tool shop. This shop always has men just staring at the tools in the window.

I reckon it's the closest thing our genes can find to making flint spears and fighting dinosaurs back when we were so unevolved to think that The X-Files was interesting viewing.

Walkmans and tools - small metal objects that somehow 'speak' to males.

They usually say to me 'buy me, buy me, I make spears!' So I have a collection of tools and Walkmans and a strange need to make spears.

Sony has this Walkman stuff sorted - I have a Sony Pro tape recorder, two Sony DATs, and two Sony Mini Disks. If Sony made Black & Decker stuff, my drills, saw, Workmate and drill bit set would all be Sony too. Bizarrely, more than 50 per cent of my Sony kit has needed repairing - some not successfully, my Sony telly (no, not widescreen) went back twice and wasn't fixed twice.

The tape recorder, a DAT and a mini disc player have all needed fixing through component failure. And yet I still buy Sony kit.

And now Sony has notebook PCs. It's been bothering me for a while. I was worried that I might have an urge to buy one, that it somehow would tap into the spear-making part of my genes.

Next door to the Dixons is a place that sells them. Taking my bank balance in my hand, I went for a look. And - hooray! - I think I'm cured. Yes, they look fine and their specs are OK, but the prices - woh! And they're that funny purpley mauve colour.

I have no intention of writing off Sony in the notebook market. My esteemed colleague and fellow columnist Gordon 'guess the colour of my beard and win a prize' Laing pointed out that they have some ridiculous market share already. But my guess is that people won't buy into the 'Walkman effect' with PCs like they do with, well, Walkmans.

In the end, people want good specifications, low price and a reasonable design. The Sony notebook is a one-off buy, more of a style statement than a workhorse PC. Sony has created another notebook category the 'coffee table' notebook. It isn't a notebook you use, but one that sits on the coffee table in the lounge catching visitors' eyes and starting conversations such as 'Oooh, what a strange colour.'

I keep spears on my coffee table - you never know when you might need them.

Chris Long is a freelance IT journalist.