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Sony VAIO E Series 14in review

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Verdict

Sony’s smallest VAIO E Series comes in colours that inevitably polarise opinion, but if the styling suits, it's a great little laptop

Review Date: 1 Apr 2010

Reviewed By: Sasha Muller

Price when reviewed: £574 (£674 inc VAT)

Overall Rating

Features & Design
5 stars out of 6

Value for Money
5 stars out of 6

Performance
4 stars out of 6

PCPRO Recommended

Performance is bang on the money, too. Intel’s Core i3-330M processor sits at its heart, and while ATI’s Radeon HD 5145 graphics chip lacks DirectX 11 compatibility, it's a decent combination. Our application benchmarks churned along to a final result of 1.27 and Crysis only slowed down to 17fps once we hit Medium detail and upped the resolution to 1,280 x 1,024. At low settings you'll be fine.

There’s little to complain about in the connectivity stakes, either. Bluetooth and 802.11n cover the all the wireless bases, while the three USB 2 ports on the right flank are opposed by eSATA, HDMI, D-SUB and Gigabit Ethernet on the other.

Delve deeper through the Sony’s DNA, however, and its love-it-or-loathe-it qualities rear their head once again. While we expected the usual 1,366 x 768 panel at this price, Sony has stretched a far more spacious 1,600 x 900 resolution across its 14 inches. That’s certainly nothing to complain about, as the extra pixels come as a breath of fresh air compared to the bulk of the mid-priced competitors.

But although image quality is good enough, it’s far from perfect. The narrow vertical viewing angles left us tilting the display back and forth as we shuffled about in our chair, and no amount of fiddling could rectify the panel’s inability to differentiate dark grey from black. We’re glad of all those pixels but be under no illusions: the image quality very much reflects the affordable price tag.

Stamina, too, is another area where the E Series falters. It’s perhaps not surprising given the presence of the dedicated graphics chipset, but even under the lightest of usage conditions we could only squeeze 3hrs 50mins from the battery. Push it with intensive applications and that could fall as low as 1hr 13mins.

So, it’s not the laptop Holy Grail, but Sony’s VAIO VPCEA1S1E/L will remain a tantalising option for many prospective purchasers. If you find the blue finish nauseating, you probably won't like the neon green and lurid pink alternatives, but the plain white or black models might ease your discomfort. Either way, the striking looks, solid performance and decent-resolution screen combine very nicely at this price. Factor in the fine keyboard on top and this Sony richly deserves its Recommended award.

Author: Sasha Muller

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Comments

User comments

small question

Probably asking in the wrong place, but what is the difference between i7 and i3, in my opinion i7 is better than i3, so lets see, there was pentium 1,2,3,4, then cores 1, 2, 4, then came the i7, and suddenly the numbers started to go down, i5 and i3. what is going on, are we no longer progressing or what, i know i9 (or i think it actually has a name) is coming out or already out, but what is the point of all these i5 and i3??? and also if you are giving it an HDMI and HD quality screen, where is the blu ray drive. I not know of services except BBC's HD iplayer, where i can watch films and tv shows in HD, so only other way to do is to watch a blu ray, ok i know this is not meant for gamers (either) but normal people do deserve something too, i am talking generally too, i see more laptops with i3 and i5 than i7 and blu-rays in them, the market is booming but no one is there to pick it up. sorry to waffle

By mobilegnet on 1 Apr 2010

i7 was released first, has I think triple-channel memory support, dynamic overclocking and hyperthreading. i5 is the same with dual-channel memory support. i3 is the same except they are dual-core without dynamic overclocking, and have an integrated graphics chip on-die. I think some of the i5's do too? Most i7's are on the 1366 socket, except one or two which are socket 1156. All the rest are 1156. See, easy. (/irony). I'm probably wrong somewhere in the above... :-/

By piphil on 2 Apr 2010

Thank for explanation

So my assumption was corrected there is a downward trend for this. hmm, thanks again piphil

By mobilegnet on 2 Apr 2010

Downward trend?

Not really! As piphil quite correctly stated, Intel just decided to launch the super-powerful exciting stuff first.

Don't forget, even Intel's lowly Core i3 is a serious step up from its Core 2 predecessors. Multi-tasking performance in particular leaves the older chips for dust.

Core i5 and i7 are significantly more powerful again, but most people will be perfectly happy with i3 for the forseeable.

As for Core i9, I sincerely doubt you'll see six-core CPUs hitting the mobile market before sometime in 2011.

Sasha Muller
Laptops Editor
PC Pro

By SashaMuller on 6 Apr 2010

Why no Firewire?

Yet again PCPro raves about a laptop with a serious shortcoming, no FireWire (IEEE 1394). The power of laptops nowadays is perfectly adequate for video editing on the go, but with no FireWire there is no simple way of capturing video from many camcorders. I realise a FireWire port can be added using the ExpressCard 34 slot (present on this laptop but in itself not ubiquitous), but FireWire used to be an integral part of laptops, so why has it disappeared? As a minimum shouldn't PCPro list the presence or absence of Firewire when it reviews laptops?

By pr00se on 8 Apr 2010

Why no Firewire?

By pr00se on 8 Apr 2010

Firewhere?

Hi pr00se,

Due to some technological gremlins, FireWire ports aren't showing up on the specification page. We're looking into it and hope to have it fixed asap. Apologies!

I'd argue that FireWire is far from essential these days, though. Most new camcorders use USB 2, so a cluster of USB ports is all many people, camcorder enthusiasts included, will ever need.

By SashaMuller on 8 Apr 2010

Blue tooth?

It this the model with blue tooth? its still very desirable this why I have bought a fw series.....You should be able to run Unix enterprise systems on this for Enterprise use.I cannot figure out why the graphics card is not NVIDIA..is this a vendor lock in?

By trickii1 on 28 May 2010

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