Verdict:
It's so fit but my gosh don't it know it. A very desirable laptop at a less attractive price.
Next to the likes of the Asus and Lenovo, the Sony is the epitome of style. Then again, at this price, it ought to be.
The slim, matt silver chassis opens to reveal an anthracite grey keyboard with an elegant brushed metal strip above it, bearing a handful of buttons to control music playback, as well as an 'AV' shortcut button that lets you access multimedia capabilities through an overlayed onscreen menu.
These positive first impressions were dented the moment our fingertips touched the keyboard. The keys are unusually flat, with almost no travel. Where good keyboards, such as the Toshiba's, can help you to forget you're not using a desktop PC, the Sony's is a rattling reminder that this is
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a laptop. We'd expect more at this price.
Still, Windows Vista Home Premium booted up in gloriously vibrant colour thanks to the display's glossy 'X-black' coating, designed to optimise contrast for DVD playback. The 15.4 inch widescreen has a native resolution of 1280x800, which is sensible for a screen of this size, though something of a wasted opportunity for the Sony's star component: a DVD writer than can also play Blu-ray movie discs. The 1080 pixel height of full HD video is more than the VAIO can display, but for the full effect without downscaling you can always use the HDMI port to plug it into an HD TV set.
Our creeping suspicion that the Sony was a little overpriced was confirmed by a look at its core specification. While the 300GB hard disk is a good size, it's no more than you'll find in the Zoostorm, ar £300 less. And the Zoostorm has a better processor than the Sony's Intel Core 2 Duo T8300, though this did bring in a decent 2D (general) benchmark score of 195%. On the 3D front, the Sony matches the Zoostorm's nVidia GeForce 8600M GS graphics chipset with 256MB of RAM, and thus equalled its 3D benchmark of 62%.
Blu-ray drives don't cost an extra £300, either. So we can only conclude that a Sony logo is a very high-priced component indeed.
