S$6680
Product Summary
7.6
out of 10View score
The bad: Expensive; no drive bay; documentation isn't in English; tiny spacebar.
The bottom line: This extraordinarily light ultraportable might thrill business travelers, but you'd be better off with a U.S. version.
Read full review of the Sony Vaio X505 »
Average User Rating
from 1 users
6
out of 10CNET Asia Review
The Sony Vaio X505 fits Gulliver-like performance into a Lilliputian body. Shelled in lightweight carbon fiber, this technological wonder, which turned heads at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, sports a 1GHz Pentium M processor and a 10.4-inch display, yet it tips the scales at a mind-blowingly light 0.785kg. It's hardly cheap either: the high-end model runs US$3,999, and you'll have to type around a few Kanji keys and deal with documentation in Japanese. Sadly, this ultraportable is sold only in Japan, so you'll have to contact an importer, such as Dynamism.com, to get one, although most business users would be far better off with a US version.
| Editors' note:
The Sony Vaio X505 is currently only available in Japan.
|
Design
Measuring only 259 x 208 x 21mm and weighing 0.785kg (without its AC adapter), the Sony Vaio X505, nicknamed the Extreme, fits easily in a briefcase or a purse. And that 21mm height figure describes only the rear edge; most of the notebook is about 12.7mm thick, and the front edge less than 10.1mm thick.
 |
| The keyboard has a few small keys but is surprisingly solid for a laptop this small. |
But despite the supersvelte chassis, Sony has managed to squeeze in a decent keyboard. You have to arch your fingers a bit for accuracy, and the right shift key is undersized, but we had no problem finishing this article on it. An eraser-head pointing stick provides cursor control and sits nestled between the G, H, and B keys. The mouse buttons live below the unfortunately small spacebar, squeezed by some extra Kanji keys that many English speakers won't need. (If Sony starts selling this model in the United States, the spacebar will be longer because Sony drops some Kanji keys whenever it makes such a transition.)
The Sony Vaio X505 is legacy-free by necessity--there's simply no room for large parallel ports and the like. However, on the left side of the unit, there are three USB 2.0 ports, a mini-FireWire port, and a small DC jack for powering peripherals; and there's a single type II PC Card slot on the right--plenty of connectivity for the modern traveler.
This tiny laptop has no fan or thermal porting, and the main deck below the screen bezel and the bottom of the laptop can become quite warm. There are also no speakers--sound output is courtesy of a miniature headphone jack next to the PC Card slot.
Features
The Sony Vaio X505's specs read like a budget laptop's--impressive, considering the unit's diminutive size. The processor is a 1GHz Pentium M, there's 512MB of SDRAM onboard, and a 20GB hard drive provides adequate storage. An Intel 82855 integrated GPU dynamically allocates up to 64MB of main memory to push pixels on the 10.4-inch, 1,024 x 768 active color display. The screen looks its best viewed from relatively narrow angles, since it's quite bright. The 802.11g wireless is provided via a Vaio Wireless LAN PC Card.
If there's a downside to the Sony Vaio X505 besides the heat and the price, it's the laptop's lack of a drive bay. (To be fair, ultraportables this small don't include an integrated drive bay.) Sony and Dynamism.com offer a number of external storage options, from a US$99 floppy to a US$599 DVD-+R/RW drive, but they can weigh almost as much as the machine itself.
The Sony Vaio X505 ships with Microsoft's Windows XP Professional operating system and a good selection of Sony utilities and programs, such as Digital Print, Drag & Drop CD+DVD, DVGate, GigaPocket Pico Player, MovieShaker, PictureGear 5.1, Smart Capture, and Sonic Stage.
Performance
The Sony Vaio X505 placed first by the narrowest of margins in this small test group of ultraportables, but that's still fast enough to be the highest-scoring Pentium M 1GHz laptop that CNET Labs has tested. The Sony Vaio X505 scored 19 percent above the similarly configured Sony Vaio TR2A. The system scored one point above the IBM ThinkPad X40, which houses similar components.
Battery Life
Despite its diminutive dimensions, the Sony Vaio X505 gets darn decent battery life, close to three hours. Not surprisingly, the heavier and thicker Sony Vaio TR2A with its 11.1V, 4,300mAh (48WHr) battery beat it handily, with more than four hours of life. The Sony Vaio X505, with its significantly smaller 11.1V, 2,000mAh (22WHr) battery, just could not keep up. The IBM ThinkPad X40, with its similarly diminutive 14.4V, 1,900mAh (27WHr) battery, also fell by the wayside, with only about two and a half hours of life. In the end, you'll give up anywhere from one to one and a half hours of battery life for the X505's ultra-ultraportable design--a trade-off that many will gladly make.
Service And Support
Sony doesn't sell the Vaio X505 in the United States (or in Asia outside Japan), so service and support are courtesy of the reseller that imports the laptop--in our case, that was Dynamism.com, which backs the laptop with a one-year, FedEx-pickup warranty and toll-free technical support. You can upgrade the warranty to up to three years at a hefty US$299 per year. The documentation accompanying our unit was in Japanese, so we were unable to judge its quality.
To find out more about how this product's warranty really stacks up and what you should look for in terms of service and support, take a look at CNET's hardware warranty explainer.
Rate It Now
User Reviews
minute improvement to sony legacy line of thin notebooks
Jan 17, 2008Rating: 6 out of 10 (Good)
Pros: thin, lightweight, mobility
Cons: diminutive specs
Opinion:
since this is being compared to the newly launched Macbook-Air, it doesn't matched with spec/price comparison. but aside from the difference in OS between the two, the layout of the keyboard also differs according to user preference. pc form factors are now in the process of elimination, such that pc manufacturers continuously produced varied but similar spec-to-spec models, that soon will diminish over which consumer would buy at an affordable price, where sony still hovers above.
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