Re: Sony Vaio P
I rather miss the Toshiba Libretto
In 2009 my girlfriend went to New Zealand for a convention and a bit of travelling around by motorcycle, and took a 110 running W98SE, upgraded with an 8GB SSD, a wireless card and an USB2 card. This was close to perfect: sufficient for email, storing pictures, and resizing and uploading a few of them.
perhaps in 1996 the hardware wasn't mature enough for the form factor (486 processor, 1260x600 display, Windows 98, 8M Ram, 270M HD)
I think you're off a bit: from memory the screen was 800x480, and the 110 had a Pentium 233 and 64MB RAM; other models were less powerful.