Hands On With Everex's $400 Cloudbook and Sony's $2,700 Vaio Premium SZ

Everex's Cloudbook and Sony's Vaio Premium SZ are very different machines. The former is an efficient little budget subnotebook that costs only $399, but has better specifications than the similarly-priced Asus Eee PC. The Vaio Premium SZ is a high-revving 13.3" beast that grinds down its battery in less than 90 minutes and costs about $3,000: you couldn't spec a MacBook to match it even if you wanted to.
Both the scrappy little Cloudbook and the wallet-pounding Vaio, however, offered a curiously similar first impression.
The Cloudbook, powered by a 1.2 Ghz Via C7-M processor, has 512Mb of RAM, a 30GB hard drive, a seven-inch 800x480 display powered by a unichrome video chip, WiFi and gOS Linux. Weighing only 2 pounds, it's designed for students, kids, and others who'll get by just fine with the basics.
The Vaio Premium SZ has a 2.5 GHz T9300 Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of RAM, a 1280x800 display powered by an Nvidia 8400M video card with 64 MB of its own discrete memory, WiFi, Sprint mobile broadband and Windows Vista Business. It's designed for people who want untrammeled power in compact form, dressed in an exotic and stylish alloy casing.
Both are fantastic machines, but both are hobbled by something that has nothing to do with how contextually superior their hardware is.
This is what you see when you turn on the extravagant, expensive Sony:

A systray and start folder filled with garbage.
And this is what you see when you turn on the ugly but ultraportable Everex and try to fire up any of the online apps that so prominently feature in its marketing:

An unclosable, application-locking popup!
Both machines immediately confront the user with annoying software configuration problems. In the Sony's case, it's loaded with craplets, freebies and trial junk. In the Everex's case, it spits out windows that are simply too large for the native display resolution.
The Sony's problems required a long session at the Add/Remove Programs dialog, and left me feeling angry that the buyers of top-end machines are still treated as mere eyeballs for advertising partners. It has AOL on it. AOL! Who spends three grand on a laptop with an integrated cellular modem, only to sign up for AOL?
The Everex has no such nonsense. But its problem is that its desktop theme is simply inappropriate for a 480x display. The user to must repeatedly hold the Alt key and resize windows to navigate the system: it's a usability nightmare for something that's aimed at less sophisticated shoppers. (Everex has delayed the Cloudbook's release, presumably to fix these pre-production issues).
Sony's premium SZ is a marvel of technology. Both in its design and as a work of engineering, it's breathtaking: something one could own for years and love for every minute of them. And yet its cavalcade of craplets made the all-important first minutes a bitter experience.
Everex's Cloudbook is a potential Asus Eee-killer, offering superior specifications to the popular machine at the same price. But it lacks the Eee's friendly default user interface, dumping the Wal-Mart shopper right into a somewhat rough-edged linux distro.