The Sony X-series at MWC

SONY UNVEILED ITS Vaio X-series late last year and we decided to put it through a real world test by taking it with us to this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Strictly speaking the X-series is a netbook - the focus is on portability, it runs an Intel Atom processor and has no optical drive - but the design and associated price tag set it at a different level.

Even when your job is keeping up with the cutting edge of the technology industry, the X-series is an astonishing piece of kit and a testament to the engineering skills of the designers at Sony. Although a few rivals, such as the LG X300 are slowly starting to tip up, there is still nothing else quite like it around at the moment.

It was only a few years ago that a trip to a show like Mobile World Congress would result in a week at the chiropractor upon your return thanks to the tremendous back ache incurred by lugging around a laptop, camera, voice recorder, notebook, a stack of press releases and a tangled bundle of chargers, cables and converters.

With the X-series weighing in at 780 grams and measuring 13mm thick when closed, it can actually start to feel like maybe you've left it behind somewhere when in fact it's just nestled in between a few sheets of paper. Even combined with the minute charger, the whole package comes in comfortably under 1kg and leaves plenty of space for hoarding cookies from the press room.

Our review unit packed in an Intel Atom Z550 2GHz processor, 2GB of DDR2 SDRAM, a 256GB Samsung SSD SATA drive and an Intel GMA 500 graphics chip.

The Atom processor used is a single core CPU, but it features Hyperthreading, so you get two virtual cores to play with. Unfortunately it seems that 2GB is the maximum amount of memory the unit can handle, which is a bit of a pity as it would have been nice to have the option to bump it up to 4GB. That said, the SSD hard drive helps make sure that Windows 7 still runs happily on the X-series.

Although very thin, Sony has made sure this model isn't unusably small. It has an 11.1-inch LCD screen, which has an LED backlight and uses Sony's X-black technology, so the 1366x768 resolution image is clear and vibrant. The keys are a little smaller than most so it takes a little bit of getting used to, but they are well spaced out and typing at speed isn't a problem after once you're used to it, even crammed into a keynote speech or Easyjet's cattle class flight.

The touchpad is a little smaller than we would have liked, but it supports multi-touch which has its uses especially under Windows 7.

There is the standard collection of wireless connections including 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Sony has jammed a 3G modem in there as well. You also get a Memory Stick and SD card slot, a pair of USB ports, headphone jack, a VGA connector and a gigabit LAN port that actually needs to be folded up when not in use as the chassis is too thin to support it normally. Under the case are a pair of fold out legs which prop up the unit to provide a slightly angled keyboard and space for the network cable.

There's also a pretty webcam with a built-in microphone, but no audio-in socket so an external microphone will have to be a USB version. The speakers are really tinny, so if you're planning on listening to music, replaying interview recordings or watching a few movies in your hotel room, you'll want to pack some headphones.

As you might expect with something this thin, the chassis and the lid in particular are worryingly pliable, but it's made from carbon fibre and easily handled being shoved into a bag after a keynote to run off to the next briefing, so perhaps appearances are deceiving in this case.

Overall the X-series performed admirably. Given its specs we weren't expecting miracles, but even doing some video editing and encoding didn't overwhelm the device, although it certainly did tax it quite heavily. For most general purposes it handles capably, and the battery's not bad either.

At the show we were regularly getting between four and six hours depending on how hard we were thrashing the Wi-Fi and how much video work we were doing, not quite the eight hours purported by Sony, but pretty impressive in our books.

Of course all of this comes with a price and in true Sony style, the X-series is eye-wateringly expensive with a price tag starting at £1,239 and climbing to £1,900 for all the bells and whistles.

Simply put, the Sony X-series was a wonderful companion for a show like Mobile World Congress. If you're spending all day running around with your life on your back and access to a network and power is sporadic at best, then this is by far the best laptop we've ever used for this type of show.

As lovely as it is, we're not sure the X-Series is worth the price, but having spent a week running around Barcelona with this in our bag, there is no denying that there is a strong business case for the X-series. For the vast majority, the massive price difference compared to similar netbooks doesn't justify the incremental improvements, but for those people for whom portability is paramount, those seemingly small differences can make the premium worthwhile. µ