Have You Heard Sony Vaio X Series?

We got a peek at Sony's plans at IFA in September, where it showed the ultra-slim, ultra-light X Series laptop. It refused to be drawn on details, but recently Sony officially announced the X Series.

As befitting a netbook that costs much, the VAIO X’s 11.1-inch screen has a higher than usual resolution of 1366 x 768; we’ve only seen this standard on the Gigabyte Touchnote T1028X. This is becoming a more common option, however, such as on the HP Mini 110. While this resolution tends to make icons too small on 10-inch netbooks, we didn’t mind it as much on an 11-inch screen. When watching content streamed over the Web or played off the VAIO X’s hard drive, we were impressed with the crispness and wide viewing angles of the display; we could turn it nearly 90 degrees to either side without seeing image reversal or egregious reflections. Being as thin as it is, we’re not surprised at the lack of audio quality in the VAIO X. Songs were thin and tinny; the bass line in Aerosmith’s “Dream On” streamed over Pandora was nonexistent, and the speakers could barely fill a small office with sound.

No-one can argue about the VAIO X-Series' design credentials. At 12.2mm, it's precisely as thick as an iPhone, and its matte-black finish is reminiscent of a sheet of graphite (the only design oddity is its brown bottom). Even the screen drew admiring gasps: it's wafer-thin, measuring 4.4mm when we clamped our calipers around it.
The main chassis is similarly slight. It's so skinny the D-SUB port on the right-hand side looks oversized. There isn't even room for a conventional network port, but rather than force people to lug around an adapter, Sony has cleverly created a hinged port: when you want to use it, the idea is to raise two tiny feet and this gives the hinge room to expand enough for you to slot in your cable.

Thankfully though, the multi-touch capable trackpad is fine, and the buttons pretty responsive. So far, so good you say for the usability aspect, but there's just one little flaw with the audio subsystem of the VAIO X. If you were thinking of using this lightweight machine as an entertainment device, we suggest skipping this idea.
In fact, even music playback of any kind isn't recommended at all by us via its supplied speakers, as they are just too soft even at full volume (unless you are blessed with superhuman hearing capabilities). And by soft, we really mean "I can't hear a thing and no I don't have hearing problems" kind of soft. A pity indeed to find such a blemish on such a classy looking netbook.

But what's most controversial about this laptop, and the reason so many people fall instantly out-of-love with it, is the processor. It's a 1.86GHz Intel Atom Z540, which may be the second fastest Atom around, and support Hyper-Threading, but the fact remains: it's an Atom. These have become so synonymous with netbooks that they almost define them, but we tried to be broad-minded: was an Atom fast enough to power anyone's main PC? So we tried. We used the X-Series as a workaday machine for office tasks for a week. It had to power two screens and cope with Word, Excel, Outlook, Firefox, Internet Explorer and numerous other utilities - all using Windows 7 Professional rather than XP.

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.

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