Sony Vaio VGN-TZ38

Sony Vaio VGN-TZ38

Even though companies like Lenovo and Apple have been fighting it out in the slim laptop stakes over the last year, they are far from being pioneers in this field. That tag goes to Sony, who introduced its TZ series of 11-inch laptops quite some time ago. This series offered some of the slimmest laptops ever made, with very good specifications and extraordinary battery life.

Sony recently updated the lineup by introducing a new model with an upgraded SSD and a new Intel processor. Let’s find out how it fares.

If you were seeing the VGN-TZ38 for the first time, you could easily mistake it for a kid’s laptop – it’s that small. Measuring 227 x 198.2 x 22.5 mm and weighing a mere 1.17 kg, this is one of the slimmest and smallest laptops I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing.

While the Macbook Air may have been hailed as a major step forward in industrial design, the truth is that the Sony Vaio is not far behind. Not only is it small and lightweight, it manages this in an aesthetically pleasing design.

The design is simply sublime, with a thin frame that manages to mesh the lid, keyboard area and underside in a very sturdy frame, which does not squeak or offer any flex. The construction material is very solid (carbon fiber) and offers a feeling of solidness that one wouldn't ordinarily expect from a laptop this size.

The subtle touches don’t only end at the body. The power button and recharge jacks have been seamlessly integrated on either side of the laptop’s hinges. The lid is happily devoid of the shiny mirror finish that everyone is fond of, and instead offers a very elegant brownish black finish that screams class.

However, this small frame is not without its issues. In order to achieve this small size, Sony has had to reduce the keyboard’s size to roughly about 90 percent of a conventional laptop's. This immediately causes a problem, as it lead to errors in typing. It took more than a few hours of working on it, before I was able to achieve error-free typing. For people with large fingers, I would suggest looking elsewhere, because this is a problem that can’t be worked around.

On its own, once you have settled in with the keyboard, you will realize why it’s been so acclaimed in the past. The keys are among the smoothest I’ve ever typed on, offering amazing tactile feedback and just the right amount of elevation to make typing for long hours a non-issue. The touchpad is also in the same vein, decently sized with a good textured finish and surprisingly large mouse buttons.

The screen of the TZ38 is vintage Sony. It’s a backlit matte-finish LED panel that offers a widescreen resolution of 1366 x 768 (16:9) in an 11.1 inch frame. As it's a backlit LED panel, there is not much to say here – the screen offers vivid colors, contrast and brightness levels, which can be only matched by Dell’s XPS range. In fact the brightness was a bit too much for me, and I had to lower it to a more comfortable range. This excellence means movies and photos just leap out at you and text is very legible, even at the large resolution of 1366 x 768.

Windows Vista looks extremely good and with its anti-aliased scaling fonts, makes full use of this beautiful panel. The only downside was that the screen offers very poor vertical angles and just about tolerable horizontal angles. This does give rise to a funny upside – the laptop is so small you will rarely be looking at it from any angle but straight on and hence will not even notice the bad side view angles.

For a small laptop, the TZ38 is moderately equipped. It offers a dual-layer DVD-RW, fingerprint reader, 2 USB ports, Firewire port, 2.0 EDR Bluetooth and a 3-in-1 media card reader. On the wireless front it supports 802.11n and this is a good thing. The TZ38 sports an Intel C2D UV 7700 processor (1.33 GHz), 2GB of DDR-667 RAM, a 48GB SSD, and its graphics are powered by Intel GMA950 graphics subsystem.

While these specifications are indeed quite healthy and the SSD is quite welcome, it nevertheless forces the laptop into a corner. The SSD is the only option offered and this kind of retards the laptop’s storage options. Keeping in mind that the laptop only has 2 USB slots, the choice of using an external drive only is a moot point as it increases the number of items to be carried around and blocks up one important connectivity port.

We tested the machine with the standard PCMark05 test and got a score of 2214. This may seem very low but please remember that the CPU on this machine has been designed with power efficiency in mind and despite having the C2D moniker is a good deal slower than more mainstream offerings. But this does not mean that the CPU is not a good performer. Along with the 2GB of system memory, Windows Vista Business proved extremely zippy and multi-tasking was a breeze. At no point did we find the performance of the laptop lagging.

Furthermore, the presence of the SSD, the power-saving CPU, and the small size translate to what is probably the best battery life of any laptop currently available. Our test unit routinely broke the 8-hour mark with light levels of work, music and other routine activities. Under a full-burn stress, the laptop responded with a drop of just 45 minutes, averaging 7 hrs 15 mins. These figures blew away anything we've seen in the past, and when you consider that you can equip the laptop with an even bigger battery... it's indeed mind-boggling.

The Vaio TZ-38 is an incredible piece of engineering. It offers unrivalled size, finish quality, weight, an amazing battery life, and comes with one of the best power-saving CPUs currently available. The main setback is its atrocious cost of Rs 1,40,000 – and the lack of an HDD option in lieu of the SSD. At this price point it goes squarely into the territory of the Macbook Air and Lenovo X300, which are far better offerings in their own right. Even if you have the cash in hand, take a good hard look at all the available options before opting for this one.