Sony's done it again, adding another capable Vaio model to it's stylish lineup.
Sony has long held a reputation of quality and luxury with its Vaio series of notebooks. It also carries the associated high-class price tag, but there’s just something about those sleek and sexy units which make you double-check the health of your credit card, just in case.
The new TT series of ultra-portable notebooks are marketed (by Sony) as the smallest Blu-ray-capable units on the market, and with this in mind we were looking forward to an extravaganza of portable media entertainment.
Sporting an 11.1in LCD screen, the Vaio TT17GN weighs in at just 1.3kg and is definitely easy to carry around. Looking at it, you actually start to wonder whether it might not be a netbook – the case is very similar to the Acer Aspire One with the rounded lid hinges and arrays of ports along the sides. The lid is staggeringly thin – so much so that you can get quite a degree of flex along its length. While it represents wonderful design, for an ultra-portable which will presumably be accessed many times a day it raises question marks as to whether the unit will be able to handle general knockabout usage or whether it will prove expensively fragile.
It sports two USB ports, one 4-pin FireWire port, VGA out, a security lock slot, a MagicGate port for Sony Pro memory sticks as well as a standard card reader. There’s also an HDMI-out port, but more on that later.
While it may remind you physically of a netbook, under the hood it’s a regular powerhouse. It’s based on the Intel Centrino 2 technology, sporting a Core 2 Duo SU9400 processor at 1.40GHz with 3MB L2 cache and 800MHz FSB. It also comes with a whopping 4GB of RAM and a 1.8in Toshiba 160GB SATA hard drive, running at 5,400rpm. The unit’s Blu-ray credentials come from the inbuilt Matshita Blu-ray optical drive, which is capable of reading and writing single- and dual-layer BD-R and BD-RE optical media, as well as the full array of DVD and CD burning options. The graphics experience is powered by a Mobile Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD with over 1GB of dedicated video RAM to throw at decoding those Blu-ray movies you’re just itching to play.
Performance was quite impressive for a unit of this size. It got through our PCMark Vantage benchmarks with an overall score of 2,150 – the individual tests showed a bias towards music playback, communications/networking and hard drive performance, whilst gaming, graphics editing and other GPU-intense processes didn’t do so well. Blu-ray playback via the bundled InterVideo WinDVD package was excellent – nice and smooth with no jerkiness at all.
Boot time was quick, taking approximately 1 minute on mains power, with the desktop fully operational by 1 minute 20 seconds. On battery power the process only took a few seconds longer.
Battery life was also good, which you’d hope for given that it doesn’t come with a spare. Sony claims that users will be able to get approximately 6 hours usage from the battery - we got around 3 hours of continuous Blu-ray playback (with wireless LAN enabled), which is enough for most movies but you’d want to purchase a spare battery for long-haul entertainment. The unit does have some very clever bundled Vaio software and power profiles to assist with maximising battery life, and there’s an ambient light sensor which automatically adjusts screen brightness. Given that, we’re not sure under what conditions users would be likely to see 6 hours of battery life, but 4-5 hours of work-related usage should certainly be feasible.
The screen quality is excellent, but if you’re used to a bright screen then the ambient light sensor can take some getting used to. The keyboard is smaller than a full-size notebook keyboard and the rows of keys are straight across with no curve to them. The combination of these two factors forces your hands and wrists closer together while typing which again takes some getting used to. As with netbooks, it’s fine for short bursts of typing but would probably prove too uncomfortable for continuous use. The trackpad is really nice – very responsive and smooth – but the left and right buttons are positioned in a way which make one-hand mouse work a bit difficult. It’s fine when using two hands, but even then because the two buttons are pushed further apart by the biometric scanner, the right button is harder to reach than on most notebooks.
The marketing message surrounding this unit is a bit unclear, and we keep getting mixed signals from it. One the one hand, the TT17GN is very definitely a media machine – it has an HDMI jack which lets you output the video playback to a 1080p-capable TV and watch your Blu-ray movies in full HD, which is a very nice (albeit rather expensive) way of achieving HD capability. The native resolution is non-standard for a widescreen notebook – it’s that strange beast of the LCD world, 1,366 x 768, which is definitely a stab in the direction of 16:9 media standards (although 1,280 x 768 might have been a better choice). Given this, you’d expect the system to come with Vista Home Premium or even Ultimate, but rather it ships with Vista Business SP1. And the 32-bit edition at that.
This is a particularly strange choice of operating system. With 4GB of RAM and a 64-bit CPU, this unit would greatly benefit from a 64-bit OS, if for no other reason that it would make all 4GB of RAM accessible, and therefore that much more viable as a business tool. But taking into account the embedded 802.11a/b/g/draft-n wireless adaptor, Bluetooth, 10/100/1000 LAN adaptor and webcam (not to mention the overall power), this notebook really does have quality credentials as a business machine.
Having said that, how many business machines need non-standard resolutions, HDMI and a Blu-ray burner? Given the seriously hefty $3,999 price tag, the TT17GN comes across much more like the ultimate toy for a Rolex-toting corporate road warrior, rather than for Mr and Mrs Consumer. In fact, it’s very much the epitome of what Vaio laptops are – sleek, powerful, luxurious, exclusive and very, very expensive.