You won't find a pinker/oranger/greener/whiter notebook this year.
Of all the notebooks available right now, the Sony VAIO C Series VPCCB15FG is certainly one of the most eye-catching. Available in pink, orange, green and white, the C Series has an all plastic exterior that’s strong, although the screen and hinges have a bit of flex. Of note is the translucent plastic that covers the back of the screen and the palm rest and which mildly glows in direct light - it’s a nice touch. The island keyboard is generously spaced, it doesn’t flex and the responsive silver keys have a short travel that we like. As for the touchpad, it isn’t particularly sensitive and is merely competent.
The Full HD 15.6in screen in the C Series has a fantastic viewing angle, but it’s very glossy. Powering the C Series is a Sandy Bridge Intel Core i5-2410M processor, and backing it up is 4GB of RAM along with a very respectable AMD Radeon HD 6630 graphics card. A PCMark Vantage score of 5,922 is a good performance, but there are much more affordable notebooks that surpass that score. Battery life is a fair 3 hours during a mixture of videos and office work, and during that time the C Series gets only slightly warm.
One good point is that the 500GB hard disk drive is 7,200rpm, so data access is faster than average. Apart from the main specs the C Series has everything you’d want, including a DVD burner, a 4-in-1 card reader, good quality stereo speakers and many ports. There are three USB 2.0 ports, a USB 3.0 port, an HDMI port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, a pair of audio jacks and an analogue display port.
The style-conscious will certainly be content with the C Series, and while the specs aren’t very impressive, for the price it’s hardly toothless. As it stands the C Series is a solid, vibrant-looking product with a great screen that is undermined by a very high price.
Available from Sony, retailing for $1,499.APC rating: 7/10