For those of you late to the party: This was an April Fool’s joke! 

In a surprising move, it appears that Sony is getting ready to unveil the newest model in the UX series, which will include a mini-CD drive. The aptly named VGN-UX491-MCD will remove the EDGE module to make way for a mini-CD drive which will accept 8cm ‘mini-CDs’. The unit is identical to the UX490 in all ways (48GB SSD, 1.2Ghz Core 2 Solo, 1GB of RAM) except for the new drive.

Mini-CDs, if you will recall, hold around 200mb of data, and are otherwise identical to the larger 12cm CD other than in size. Luckily the diameter of the hole in the center of the mini-CD is the same as a full sized CD, this means that mini-CDs that you use in your UX will also be able to function in most standard CD drives. The drive will be able to burn mini-CDs (no word on speed yet), and this will finally offer an out-of-the-box option for UX users to burn their own recovery disks. Users will be able to use the recovery software that comes pre-installed to burn their recovery disks which will fit on 23 mini-CDs.

The drive will most likely use a non-powered eject (no motors to eject the drive, just a ‘pop’ similar to many laptop drives). No word yet on pricing, availability, or if non-US CF slot models will see the same treatment.

This information comes from the UX491-MCD flash tour which seemed to have mistakenly gone up early on SonyStyle.com in place of the UX490’s flash tour. It looks like Sony has already caught their mistake and removed the flash preview of the UX491-MCD, I’ll keep these images mirrored here for future reference.