Sony Vaio Z series hands-on review

THIS WEEK Sony showed off its Vaio Z laptop in London the other day, where The INQUIRER had a brief look at the super-slim and powerful lap warmer.

The Vaio Z is Sony's latest and greatest laptop and we think the device is attractive but we've got reservations about the dock system and the price.

The design is stylish and sleek without unnecessary garish features. It's a clean and simple look with nice touches, like the fact the bottom part of the laptop angles upwards as you open the screen.

It is slightly hard to believe Sony's Vaio Z is as thin and light as it is at just 16.65mm and 1.2kg. This makes it both thinner and lighter than Apple's Macbook Air, but we do have to admit that the fruit themed firm's laptop looks nicer.

Even when you add the 'sheet battery' to double the battery life you only have to add on 680g to the weight, a small price to pay for a total of 14 hours use. The sheet battery is nice and easy to attach with a couple of clips and thumb screws and it doesn't require the laptop to be shut down first.

The screen is a little smaller than the Macbook Air at 13.1in with 1600x900 resolution. We really like the anti-reflective coating, which made viewing the screen much easier.

Though we couldn't exactly benchmark the laptop, it certainly ran really smoothly on its Sandy Bridge Core i7 chip clocked at 3.4GHz, on paper quite a bit faster than the Macbook Air's 1.86GHz or 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. The Vaio Z laptop also has considerably more RAM with 8GB, while its rival with an Apple logo on the lid has only 2GB.

Both the keyboard and touchpad are nice to use with a backlight on the keyboard for dark conditions. The touchpad is button-less and has a cool carbon fibre look. There's also a fingerprint scanner in the middle of the touchpad, which we though was slightly in the way.

One of the major differences with the Vaio Z is its Power Media Dock, which is effectively an external optical drive and a few I/O ports. But it's also much more than that when you consider that it has an AMD Radeon HD6650M graphics card inside it.

This connects to the laptop using a proprietary connector that looks like a USB port and uses 'Light Peak' fibre optic technology for high speed data transfer. It also has a power connector to power the laptop. We think this is a very clever idea, but it's also quite annoying.

It seems tha the idea is to leave the dock on your desk and make do with integrated graphics and no optical drive when you're traveling. It would be possible to take the dock around with you, but it's not exactly as light as a feather and if you want the shiny holder for the dock, you'll be sad to hear that it's as heavy as a brick.

The only way to really make a proper call on the dock is to use it for a while and see how much you use it.

Although we really wouldn't mind having a Vaio Z laptop, we're fearful that the price will make it unaffordable for most people. Prices start at £1,434, and that's for the lowest configuration. If you want all the trimmings and gravy then you'll be looking at a price of nearly £4,000. Ouch. µ