Sony's Unique View on the Exchange Rates?

So I was looking for more information about the new Sony P as it looks kinda cool and I'll be in the market for a laptop soon and so I came across the official American SonyStyle site, selling it for $900. So I thought, that's not bad as that's about £600, and I checked to see if it was on the UK site, and sure enough, it was. However, it's being sold for £1369. That's over $2000 according to XE.com! I'm not sure if a UK keyboard really costs the $1100 difference... Did I miss something or is that what Sony's actually doing? Even without the VAT, the price is still $1,806.72.

Anyway, after looking at the device more, it seems to be too close to a mobile phone compared with a proper laptop. After all, my Sony Ericsson X1 has a full keyboard and Windows Mobile already. I think I may wait for the Dell Studio XPS 16 to lower in price (and when I have cash) and get one of those as a mobile desktop replacement. The other option is to get a netbook and a new desktop PC, my current desktop PC is ancient by today's standards and my laptop died last year.

Edit: On closer inspection, the UK model has a 128GB SSD as standard as opposed to the 60GB HDD of the US one, and the UK one also has built in 3G and an Atom Z530 1.6GHz CPU in place of the Intel 1.33GHz processor. Still doesn't justify the price difference, unless the SSD really is worth that much...

Bejeweled Twist

As great as Fallout 3 is, ultimately it's got a finite amount of stuff you can do (tho admittedly, it does have a tonne of stuff you can do). However puzzle games like Tetris and the new Bejeweled Twist have endless appeal because they never have an end. It's a simple game, it's basically the Bejeweled game but instead of swapping tiles, you rotate blocks of four and if you match 3 or more tiles in a row, they disappear. However there's lots more going on to keep you interested.

Firstly, if you can get a chain of matches, the longer your chain, the higher the multiplier gets. If the multiplier maxes out (at 10x), you get one of the tiles turned into a fruit. If you match the fruit, then all the tiles of that type get erased and you get lots of points. You also get bonus points for cascades, being when the tiles are erased, when the ones above fall down, they form another match, etc. And while all of this is going on, there's another bonus for getting tiles in a certain order defined in the bottom left. If you do this after matching a fruit, you get the mega fruit bonus where something... special happens (as well as a mountain of points). There's a number of things to hinder you as you play. The game can randomly lock tiles meaning you can't move that tile until it's been matched, you also get bombs which are tiles which need to be matched before the counter of them which drops every move, reduces to zero, otherwise it's game over

It's certainly one of those "just one more go" type games and as it gives you a score, it's quite competitive if you know other people playing the game. Sadly the PC version of the game doesn't have online scoreboards (my only criticism of the game) so you have to just exchange scores with your friends. Recently, I've been competing against koebijmoonlight who managed to get to 1,028,850 when I had around 997,000. However this afternoon I decided to have a quick go (no such thing!) and beat his score getting 1,047,500 :)

I'd recommend it if you like this kinda game, there's a demo on Steam and it's £15 on there too. I do hope they bring it to Xbox 360 tho as then it'd use online scoreboards. Be warned though, it is rather addictive, and you'll end up looking at things in real life, rotating them in your mind! I got my Mum a copy and it's been all she's played since :P