Today seems to be a Sony day with tons of news coming from the Blu-Ray supporter. While the specs and features may be pretty good, the one thing that sets VAIO R apart from its competitors, predecessors and successors, is the split tower design. Essentially, Sony has designed VAIO R in such a way where bare essentials are easily accessible, and the rest of the vital components are nicely tucked away in another box.

The VAIO R tower splits into separate boxes with the first one containing a Blu-Ray drive, USB and Firewire ports, and card readers in a 1.8” rectangular tower that you can put on the desk. The second box, however, can be tucked away underneath a desk without having to worry about the aforementioned connectivity ports.

The key tower is packed with 4x 500GB SATA disk drives, Intel 2.96GHz Core 2 Duo microprocessor, NVIDIA 7600GT 256MB graphics adapter, a number of analog and digital TV tuners, up to 3GB of DDR2 memory and a host of PCI/PCIe expansion slots.

The system is again available exclusively in Japan between $1,632 and $4,717. It will ship on October 28.

There’s no word on North American availability, though it will ultimately show up here as well.

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