Sony has built in dedicated links to YouTube and Windows Live

The programmable remote has very useful backlighting. Press any key and all of the others light up. Most of the labels are on the buttons, which makes them readable in the dark. But the remote is big and clunky, and several commonly used buttons (including Menu and Inputs) are small and easy to miss.

The VF550XVT has picture-in-picture, which works fine as long as you've turned off the parental control Rating option. And there's a PIP button on the remote, unlike with Samsung's recent PIP-equipped TVs (such as the LN55A950, the LN46A650, and the PN50A760).

But there's more to browsing the Web than fast-loading pages. That's where Chrome 2.0 is still far inferior to Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Among the four devices we tested, only one -- the SonicWall NSA E7500 -- provided a significant level of protection against malware, blocking 96 percent of the attacks we threw at it. The Astaro Security Gateway 425 and WatchGuard Firebox Peak X5500 fell far short, blocking a mere 26 percent and 33 percent of the attacks, respectively. The ZyXel ZyWall USG1000 took the middle ground, blocking a more respectable 69 percent of the attacks.

Mark my words: This point won't be lost on the open source HP 2710P battery community. Android may now be a minor presence in the handset world. But this is changing. Samsung announced plans to launch three of their new phones with Android in 2009. T-Mobile is even putting Android on non-mobile gadgets, such as a tablet computer.

Sony has built in dedicated links to YouTube and Windows Live, so you can perform a video or Web search through these two services with just a couple of clicks. If you want to search for something else, you can type through an on-screen keyboard.

Videos play in much the same way and its easy to scroll through available mobile TV stations. (Sony didn't say whether overseas versions will support local mobile TV formats).

Bravo SE Disc Publisher is the ability to automatically burn and  label multiple CDs or DVDs, all in one device. The $1,495 disc publisher records 20 discs at a time, and labels in color at up to 4800 dpi (dots per inch). It can print labels on inkjet-printable discs, even 8G-byte dual-layer DVDs.

Published Vulnerability Attacks, drawn from the US-CERT database) were all exploits of known vulnerabilities (no "zero day" surprises) in a wide range of popular operating systems, applications, and protocols (Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, Cisco IOS, Apache, SQL, ICMP, SSH, and so on). We threw the full range of exploits at our UTMs, about 600 attacks in all, but the UTMs should have been designed to thwart such threats. And still hundreds were allowed to pass through.

So far, I've just talked about the navigation and the use of the player but neglected to say much about the screen itself. The X-series features a 3-inch OLED (organic LED) screen that is bright and offers a 432 by 240 pixel resolution, which means images are vibrant and crisp. The touch screen was responsive and I didn't have any problems with it.

It comes with PTPublisher SE CD burning software Compaq 192835-001 and SureThing CD Labeler Primera Edition to design the labels. The software, with its typical interactive Windows interface, is easy to use.

UTM functions require gobs of processing in order to peek into packets to look for malware, so it should be no surprise that the devices -- all except the Astaro -- took a significant hit in throughput when under attack. Compared to their maximum throughput without attacks, the WatchGuard took a 45 percent hit, the ZyXel 36 percent, and the SonicWall 23 percent. The Astaro, which blocked the fewest attacks in our test, barely lost a step when under attack -- a surprisingly tiny 2 percent dip from maximum throughput. Generally, however, you should be prepared for huge hits to throughput when you turn on all of the security functions of a UTM. You are not getting a wire speed device. On the plus side, unless your WAN link is a gigabit Ethernet feed, you may never notice the slowdown.

In Japan there will be two versions: The NW-X1050 has 16GBs of memory and the X1060 has double that. Sony estimates the 16GB of the X1050 is enough space to store about 4,100 songs encoded at the standard 128Kbps mode. Alternatively it Compaq 196234-B22 will accommodate 36 hours of 784Kbps video.

Battery life, which I couldn't test during the news conference, is up to 33 hours in music player mode although that decreases quickly into the single digits when viewing video, watching TV or running Wi-Fi. Audio format support includes MP3, Windows Media, Linear PCM and ATRAC files while they will play AVC, MPEG4 and WMV9 video files.