HP DV3005

HP DV3005

The 13-inch laptop market has seen steady movement over the past year with the release of a quite a few products from manufacturers like HP, Dell, Toshiba and Sony. The one laptop that's been dominant in this space has been Dell’s XPS M1330, which has won much acclaim for its sleek design and great performance.

HP recently introduced the DV3005, which due to its positioning is a direct competitor to Dell’s offering. Let’s find out how it fares.

One thing I have always enjoyed about HP has been the consistency of their designs, over the last few years, with regard to their DV series. All of these laptops have the same “HP imprint” lid and body finish: a glossy tough plastic finish with a limited variety of colors. The DV3005 follows this design philosophy strictly and offers only a basic though fairly attractive black finish.This is prevalent for both the lid and the underside of the laptop.

In build quality, the DV3005 fares well as the construction material used is very sturdy. There was no audible squeak anywhere from the body or the hinges. The only downside is that its glossy surface will attract fingerprints. Weight-wise the laptop is around 2.35 kg, which is a bit on the heavy side but nothing that one can’t live with.

The keyboard area of the DV3005, however, startled me a bit. In a major departure from the past, HP has chosen to equip this model with a very shiny metallic finish, similar to a slab of iron. This is astonishing, as this finish is very reflective and can easily double as a mirror. If this is HP’s attempt at giving the laptop some bling, it fails miserably.

The finish has another drawback in that, apart from being a fingerprint magnet, it can get scratched easily. This was apparent on our test piece, which had a number of tiny but visible scratches. While these do occur on other laptops to, on this particular finish they stand out like pimples on the face of a beauty queen. Not pretty.

The metallic finish is not restricted to the area around the keyboard. It has been used on the keys too. However, this has not affected the typing experience, as the keys are well-textured and offer good feedback. Furthermore the keys are a little elevated, as compared to standard sets, and this allows for rapid typing without fatigue.

Sadly, the touchpad of the DV3005 is a disappointment. Its texture is a little too smooth, leading to imprecise mouse control, and the mouse buttons sometimes don’t register clicks.

The underside of the keyboard sports speakers from Altec Lansing. The speakers themselves are not much to rave about. Sound quality was restrained at best, but behaved admirably at higher volumes, with good clear highs and lows with a bit of under-driving on the mids.

The LCD panel on the DV3005, as the series denotes, is a 13.3 inch panel with a native resolution of 1280x800. Unlike the Dell which sports a bright and brilliant backlit LED panel, HP has chosen to stick to a tried and trusted LCD panel for this model. The screen is adequately bright, and offers excellent levels of contrast and color, but suffers when it comes to viewing angles.

Connectivity-wise, the DV3005 is really loaded. It offers a built-in web camera, a fingerprint reader, HDMI output with HDCP support, VGA output, three standard USB ports, an ExpressCard slot and a 5-in-1 media card reader. There is even an eSATA/USB combo port available.

Other specifications are average. Powered by a 'Santa Rosa'-based Intel T5550 processor, the laptop has an Nvidia 8400M GS graphical subsystem, 2GB of system memory , and a 250GB HDD. As a result, the test scores we got were strictly average at 4181 in the PCMark 06 test and around 1200 for 3DMark06.

In the battery tests we got some weird results. In its first run the battery life maxed out at a little over 2 hours 20 minutes. Subsequent recharges and discharges saw figures of 2 hours 34 minutes, 2 hours 49 minutes and then suddenly 1 hr 58 minutes. The use patterns for each of the test remained the same, with no variance, so we can safely assume the battery can easily last 2½ hours.

One of the things HP has advertised about the DV3000 is its biometric login system. With this it’s possible to use any one of your fingers and log into the system by a simple swipe. While this is hardly a new concept, it’s the first time I've seen it implemented in such a flawless manner. It’s possible to 'enroll' all your fingers, and a simple quick swipe logs you in.

The test piece we received proved to be a mid-level performer. It offers adequate features, good performance and battery life, and is very well-priced at Rs 53,000. If one were to upgrade its features in terms of storage, system memory and choice of CPU, it will have the potential to become a strong 'segment leading' contender. The only downside is its shiny interiors, but if you can overlook that you get a strong laptop that delivers on all fronts.

Source:- Tech2

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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.

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