Pretty in pink, but no light weight
Jenneth Orantia29 February 2008, 5:45 PM
With colour options like luxury pink, indigo blue and blazing red, it’s clear that the VAIO is designed for fashion-conscious users who rate appearance above all else.
What’s surprising is that it doesn’t have the decadent pricetag to match. Admittedly it’s the most expensive notebook in this roundup test, but the excellent build quality, gorgeous design and respectable set of features make it competitive with machines that sell for twice as much.
The CR13G’s forte is multimedia. In addition to running Windows Vista Home Premium, it has a dedicated instant-on AV mode for playing DVDs, photos and music without booting into Windows, as well as a fixed-position 1.3-megapixel webcam, dedicated multimedia keys and a tonne of preinstalled Sony multimedia applications. Add to this a good-sized 100GB hard drive and you’ve got a machine that’s well-equipped for home and personal use.
Sony’s notebook is one of the only units submitted with a Core 2 Duo processor and discrete graphics — in this case a 2GHz T7100 chip and ATI Mobility Radeon X2300 graphics. Combined with 1GB of RAM, this returned the best benchmark results of 720 in 3DMark06 and 3,837 in PCMark05. Battery life is a decent two hours and 15 minutes.