Sony Vaio S Series: Review

Since the iPad appeared, netbooks are so last year. Everyone wants to talk tablets.

This is fine with me, because I think the netbook was never a very closely defined concept and it gradually dissolved – perhaps as part of a Microsoft master plan – when netbooks (once so lean and stripped back) started putting on the pounds, and notebooks became available in smaller sizes.

Be that as it may, it’s predicted that around 58 million netbooks will be sold this year, compared with around ten million sales of Apple’s iPad and (we’d guess) somewhat fewer tablets from other vendors such as the Dell Streak, the HP Slate, a Google tablet, a Microsoft product, and so on.

And notebooks sell even more, of course. Which is why it was no surprise to see Sony – the doyen of chic laptops – refreshing its laptop range earlier this year. Even a brand as fashion-conscious as Sony has to keep up with what is actually selling.

An ideal companion?

I’ve finally got my hands on the company’s Vaio S Series, which wants to be the ideal travelling worker’s companion. With a 13-inch screen and a built-in CD drive, the Sony Vaio S Series is clearly a notebook, but it is small and light enough (1.97kg) to slip in a bag and more or less go anywhere a netbook would – though with a list price of around £900 you might think twice about hauling it about with too much gay abandon.

The S Series is very nice to use. The keyboard is the right size and delightfully responsive, and lights up gently in darkness so it’s easy to type on a train or a plane.

Typing on it does have one massive drawback, and that’s the fact that the touchpad is not recessed enough. It is almost flush with the casing in front of the keyboard, and this means that when touch typing and resting the heels of my hands on the front of the computer, I found the cursor scooted off to a random part of the document every time my hand brushed the touchpad.

It is possible to have a notebook that does not do this – it’s just a matter of recessing the touchpad a millimetre or two – Sony’s failure to do so would be enough to make me look elsewhere when buying a laptop. The laptop had a quick trip round other members of my family who all had the same trouble, so the fact that a laptop makes it into production like this suggests to me that Sony’s ergonomics people aren’t up to scratch, or the company only knows dainty people, who type with their hands elegantly in mid-air.

If for any reason you find yourself using this laptop or a similar one, there’s a solution: put a Post-it over the track pad when you are typing.

Niggles in a great design

Another niggle is the way the keyboard lights up. It seems churlish to quibble, when my normal work laptop has a horrendous keypad which is a nightmare to type on, and no keyboard lights at all0, but the incompleteness bugs me. All the letters and symbols shine out, but the blue icons on the function keys don’t. This means you have to guess and fiddle if you want to change the volume or brightness or anything like that, in low light.

It’s a fast performer, with one of the new 32nm Intel Core i5-520M processors running at 2.4GHz, with the option to speed up either of the two cores to 2.933GHz, or slow it down to save power. And it’s the right generation for Windows 7, so it starts and closes gratifyingly quickly.

With all that power – and a GeForce 310M graphics processor – battery life doesn’t seem spectacular. However there are options to tweak (including one that is set by default to preserve the battery’s life by only charging it to 80 percent). I got around five hours of work out of it.

And of course, being a Sony  Vaio, it does look gorgeous. It’s slate grey, and the power button is nicely placed on one end of the hinge, with the power adapter socket at the other.

Overall, I enjoyed meeting the Vaio, and I think the brand has moved on a long way from the days when it was seen as an impractical catwalk model of laptops.

There are no rough edges to this design, but issues like its trackpad show that Sony’s laptops can still be a little too smooth.