Flashpack

  1. (via Sony Vaio Y Series)

    Microsoft handed me one of these little laptops to use several months ago, and since then I’ve been playing with it off and on.

    I’m going to be honest, it doesn’t hold a candle to my 13” Macbook Pro. I use the MBP for just about everything I do, and the Vaio just kind of sits there and watches.

    Sony Vaio Y Series

    That being said, I do have some good things to say about the Vaio Y Series:

    • It’s very small, and super-comfortable to carry around. I can easily hold it in one hand and close it without getting the other one involved…that’s portability.
    • It doesn’t look super-cheap and ugly the way a lot of Windows laptops do. People ask about it; it’s fairly attractive for a laptop in its price range.
    • Speaking of price-range, comparing it to my Macbook Pro isn’t really fair…the MBP ran about $1300, and this little guy retails for somewhere in the neighborhood of $400-600, depending on what country you’re in and how hard you shop.
    • The specs are actually quite nice. A nice, big 500 GB hard drive, 4 GB of RAM, a 1.65 dual-core processor. The display clocks in at 1366 x 768, which is not bad for an 11-incher (though it can power a 1920 x 1200 external monitor without too much trouble). It’s also got a web cam and a bunch of peripheral ports (USBs, ethernet, SD, yadda yadda).
    • The graphics card is pretty dismal, but you can play older games (and some newer games on the lowest quality settings) on the Vaio Y Series, and it plays HD videos just fine.
    • I will say that the machine itself is actually a hell of a buy, and the only thing that has kept me from using it more is the incredibly bad touchpad. It’s tiny and unresponsive. I also tend to brush it constantly when typing on the (otherwise excellent) chiclet-style keyboard, which moves my cursor and leads to me typing 4 or 5 lines up or down the page. Not ideal.
    • I also miss multi-touch from the MBP. If the Vaio had two-finger scrolling, that’s all I’d really need. Instead it has an awkward pseudo-scroll on the right side of the tiny touchpad. Otherwise you have to navigate all the way over to the far right of the screen any time you want to pan down (unless you want to use the arrow keys, which are clunky on the modern web).
    • The machine is quite rugged…I don’t even have it in a sleeve, and it’s survived many rough jaunts in many different kinds of bags.

    Long story short, if I had to purchase a Windows machine for ultra-portability, travel and anything graphics non-intensive, I’d give the Sony Vaio Y Series a close look. In fact, if they manage to add another megapixel to the built-in camera and increase the size and quality of the touchpad, they’d have an excellent machine that would have me questioning whether or not I should switch over the the PC-side for a while, just to try it out.

    As it is, though, what they’ve got is a solid machine with a few awkward quirks that keeps it from being as great as it could be.

    Next model, perhaps? I’ll be looking out for it, Sony.