By Lu Weiquan
14/02/2005
URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/notebooks/0,39050488,39074641p,00.htm

Portability is the buzzword for Sony nowadays with its recent notebook offerings in the ultraportable category. The Vaio T is one such lightweight model in SonyÂ’s product line-up. As all you mobile warriors know, while mobility is one thing, performance is another altogether. Thankfully, the Vaio T is a potent combination of both, along with an extensive battery life to sweeten the spot. While its price may be a little on the stiff side, the Vaio T is well worth its weight and more.

The frame of the Vaio sure is sleek though the battery sticks out quite a bit.

Design
Measuring a compact 272 x 205 x 25mm and peaking at 1.38kg, the Vaio T is a pleasure to hold. While its frosted silver casing gives the notebook a touch of class, the casing material isn't as robust, partly due to its rather plastic feel.

The keyboard is surprisingly broad, with buttons large enough for snappy typing without fear of accidental cross-key pressing. The directional keys are a tad smaller than what we are used to, but the rest of the keys felt natural and familiar to type on. All this along with ample key depth and feedback make for an outstanding typing experience. The touchpad is highly responsive and accurate, requiring minimal effort to operate properly, and the mouse buttons are elevated to just the right height for proper clicking.

The Vaio T incorporates several buttons on the LCD hinge for activating and using the DVD player. While this notebook lacks the presence of other quick launch keys for applications, the DVD control buttons can be configured to launch other programs as well. There are also dedicated volume control and mute buttons. While the Vaio T begins to look like an all-in-one mobile entertainment device, it does disappoint in the sound department; the stereo speakers at the base of the unit can only manage rather uninspiring audio reproduction.

A dual-format DVD burner lines the right edge.

Features
Picking up from where its predecessors left off, the Vaio T packs a mean punch for its small size. Sporting the Intel Pentium M Processor ULV 733 (1.1GHz) with a 2MB L2 cache, 512MB DDR333 RAM upgradeable to 1GB, 40GB of hard disk space and running on Intel Extreme Graphics, the Vaio T is simply a bundle of joy. For Wi-Fi connectivity, the Vaio T uses Intel's Centrino mobile technology supporting 802.11b/g networks.

The Vaio T features a 10.6-inch WXGA screen. We were impressed by its brightness, sharpness and high screen refresh rates. While not as large as many typical notebook screens, the Vaio T's LCD does a good job of displaying everything the user needs to see in its natural 1,024 x 768 resolution. However, when we tried switching to any resolution other than 1,024 x 768, the viewing area shrank accordingly instead of expanding to fill up the screen. This means that users playing games that run at less than the 1,024 x 768 resolution will have problems as they will have to squint in order to make sense of the small display.

Even for its small footprint, Sony still manages to squeeze in a DVD±RW drive along with a wide range of connectivity options such as two USB 2.0 ports, FireWire, an Ethernet LAN port, modem, VGA-out, a PCMCIA slot and the standard audio and microphone jacks. As do most Sony notebooks, the Vaio T comes with a Memory Stick PRO slot. While an S-video port would have been nice to have we were already bowled over by the Vaio T's wide range of offerings. One little annoyance we had was with the plastic flaps used to cover the LAN and modem ports: The covers felt flimsy and looked as if they might break easily.

Performance And Battery Life
We ran MobileMark 2002 on the machine to gauge the performance and battery life of the Vaio T. Upon running our standard test, we obtained a respectable performance rating of 145, though it fell short of our Editors' Choice-winning Fujitsu LifeBook P7010's score of 171.

Battery life was simply outstanding. Enduring 332 minutes (slightly over 5.5 hours) on the MobileMark 2002 test, this Sony ultraportable ranks among the top notebooks, beating the Fujitsu LifeBook P7010 (300 minutes) by about a half hour.

Service And Support
The Vaio T comes with a one-year warranty covering parts and labor. At the Vaio Web site, you have access to a decent selection of resources such as upgrade drivers, software patches and FAQ. For product enquiries or service information, the site provides the necessary telephone numbers and operation hours of its outlets in Singapore.

The notebook runs on Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2. Preinstalled software include Sony's range of audio and DVD-burning utilities as well as Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 for graphics editing work and Adobe Premiere Standard for video editing. The unit also comes with Norton AntiVirus 2004 which provides security against virus attacks.