All About Sony Vaio X

Sony touts the VAIO X as the world’s lightest notebook, and at 1.4 pounds (with the four-cell battery), it is; even the Viliv S7 Premium, which has a similar processor but a smaller 7.0-inch screen, weighs 1.8 pounds. When you put the extended battery on the VAIO X, the weight—2.2 pounds—is still more than half a pound lighter than most 10-inch netbooks. Measuring 11.0 x 7.3 x 0.6 inches (without the extended battery), the VAIO X rivals the MacBook Air in terms of thickness; however, its footprint is similar to other netbooks with the same screen size. When the extended battery is attached (by means of two screws that give the underside a quasi-steampunk feel), the back of the system is raised up by about 0.3 inches, and slants towards the user. The battery also doesn’t lie flush with the underside of the system; it’s designed with gaps in it to aid in the cooling of the netbook.

Moving on to inspect other build aspects of the notebook, we found that the screen quality was great with decent viewing angles and brightness. You'll find that despite the higher resolution (1366x768), the fonts were still pretty crisp and clear.
Heading downwards, we find a familiar looking keyboard that's done in chiclet style. Despite the extra space from its almost 12-inch (11.6-inch) frame, the keyboard and key layout still feels tiny for comfortable usage. There's also quite a bit of flex that does sometimes detract from the typing experience.

With the exception of an undersized right Shift key, the keys were decently spaced and sized, but overall, it felt slightly cramped. Also, as a result of the netbook’s thinness, there’s less travel to the keys than on other systems, so we ended up hitting them harder than we’re accustomed to. Also notable is the Vaio's touchpad, which supports multi-touch input. This allows gestures such as pinching together two fingers to zoom in, for example. A pair of flip-out feet underneath the chassis lifts it to angle the keyboard when on a desk, and we found the Vaio X Series comfortable to use when sitting on your lap as well, as the screen can be pushed quite far back to a suitable angle.

Being a netbook (and not an Ion-powered one at that), the VAIO X doesn’t perform graphically demanding chores all that well. Its 3DMark03 score of 364 was nearly 290 points shy of the category average (3DMark06 would not run on the system). Still, a 720p MPEG-4 movie trailer (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) played smoothly at full screen, even when output via VGA to a 32-inch Samsung HDTV (of course, the max output resolution was only 1366 x 768).While taking the sightseeing tour in Google Earth, we were only able to average 5 frames per second with the app at full screen, and 3D buildings, such as those seen at Googleplex, took nearly half a minute to load. By comparison, the HP Mini 311, which has a discrete Nvidia Ion LE graphics chip, averaged 24 fps on the same test.

Let's get down to the scores then, shall we? With a battery life of 272 minutes, the unit does pretty well on our battery life test. A number of factors contribute to its long lasting battery life such as its LED-backlit screen, the SSD drive and an ultra low voltage Atom processor (it's more power saving than the normal N-series). Remember when we mentioned earlier that the audio volume was too soft? Note that we cranked it up to 100 per cent for our battery test to ensure a somewhat comparable power draw against the usual 50 per cent volume that we use for testing the other netbooks.

While connectivity is understandably limited by the minute dimensions, Sony has done an impressive job nonetheless - once again putting the MacBook Air to shame. There are two USB ports, a headphone/microphone jack, a Gigabit Ethernet port and a VGA port for video. Regrettably there's no HDMI, but incredibly Sony has found enough space for a memory card reader. It's not a pointless Sony propriety one, either, supporting MS and SD card formats in one.