Sony VAIO Z

Review by Engadget

We see countless laptops come and go through the seasons, but a rare few have built up something of a following. Make no mistake: the Sony VAIO Z, a skinny ultraportable brimming with cutting-edge technology and powerful innards, is that kind of gem. So when it disappeared from Sony's online store earlier this year, more than a few techies took note. After all, the Z is part of a small fraternity of notebooks that combine an impossibly lightweight design with performance worthy of a larger system. People who missed out on the last-gen Z wondered when they'd next get the chance to buy, while some lucky folks out there with thousands to burn started itching for something thinner, something lighter, something... better.

Well, it's here. The 2011 VAIO Z is, indeed, thinner, lighter, and more powerful. It also might not be the Z you were expecting. Whereas the last generation combined it all, cramming in an optical drive and switchable graphics, this year's model leaves much of that at the door -- or, at least, in an external dock that ships with the laptop. This time around, the Z has no optical drive, and packs just an integrated Intel graphics card on board. (Don't worry, it does squeeze in lots of other goodies, including standard-voltage Sandy Bridge processors and expanded solid-state storage.) If you want that Blu-ray burner or the stock AMD Radeon HD 6650M graphics card, you'll have to plug into the Power Media Dock, an external peripheral that uses Intel's Light Peak technology.

That's quite the gamble Sony is taking -- after all, the company is essentially betting that you won't need to do anything too intensive while you're on the go. On the one hand, this inventive design is sure to intrigue the Z's usual early adopter fanbase. But will it satisfy those who always liked the Z because of its no-compromise design? And then there's the issue of that $1,969 starting price, a likely stumbling block for people trying to decide between this and an equally thin, less expensive ultraportable. What's a well-heeled geek to do? Let's find out.

Keyboard and trackpad

As common as Chiclet keyboards are today, Sony was one of the first to jump on the island-style bandwagon. That means it's had a lot of time to think about what makes a great typing experience: how bouncy should the keys be? How far apart should they sit, and to what extent, if any, can people tolerate shrunken Shift buttons? All told, we'd say Sony has landed a winning formula. The keys are well spaced, fairly quiet, and have a pleasant, soft finish. Like the last-generation, this year's Z has a backlit keyboard-- a touch we'd be shocked not to find in a premium system like this.

And yet, while we made few spelling errors, the shallow keys didn't quite feel as comfy as other keyboards we've tested. The best analogy we can think of is what it's like to wear flip-flops. When you're wearing these shoes, which lack any kind of heel or arch support, you might notice your toes rolling into a claw. They push into the flip-flop, gripping the rubber to the extent that there's anything to grab. With the Z's keyboard, too, the keys are so short that there isn't much to latch onto. As we typed, we could feel ourselves bearing down on the keys with a bit more pressure than we'd normally apply. Even the MacBook Pro has slightly cushier keys -- and let's not even get started on the pillowy keyboard found on any ThinkPad. With bigger, more tactile keys like those, our hands fly over the keyboard -- they don't tense up because the buttons are simply easier to press. That said, in the grand scheme of things, the VAIO Z's keyboard is one of the sturdier and better arranged we've seen.

In yet another design switcheroo, Sony opted for a buttonless trackpad this go 'round. We'll be honest, we've had mixed experiences with seamless touchpads -- though most use the same underlying Synaptics technology, laptop manufacturers implement it differently. In Sony's case, the touch experience is mostly pleasant, at least when it comes to just moving the cursor to and fro. The touchpad, which measures nearly three inches by one and a half (76.2 x 38.1mm), has a low-friction surface, while a raised, lizard-inspired pattern makes the tactile experience. The touch buttons are ever-so slightly stiff, but the real problem is that there's a hyper sensitive fingerprint reader wedged in the center. It's all too easy to accidentally tap it with your fingers, which causes unwanted dialog boxes to appear onscreen. We suggest disabling that, unless biometric sensors are your cup of tea. Other than that, our main complaint about the touchpad is that it chokes on two-fingered scrolling. At first it'll appear to work seamlessly. You'll feel in control as you page up and down through a document. It all works perfectly until... it doesn't. Intermittently, we had vexing moments when we had to press hard with our fingers to make scrolling work, or where we moved our digits up and down and nothing happened.


Display and Sound

The 13.1-inch display on our test unit had 1920 x 1080 resolution, though the base model comes with a 1600 x 900 panel. One of the first things we noticed about the Z -- even before its impossibly light weight, perhaps -- is that if you look at the screen from the side it has an odd reddish tint. It's a shame, because the viewing angles from the sides are actually quite good. Head-on, fortunately, the display looks gorgeous, with white whites, black blacks, and no sign of that puzzling red overcast that troubled us from oblique angles. We're also happy to report that the viewing angles are equally excellent if you push the lid forward -- a real possibility if you intend to use this thing on a plane or commuter rail.

While Sony's dished up one premium display, it dropped the ball as far as sound quality goes. The twin speakers deliver pretty weak volume and, what's more, the audio is pretty tinny. Not necessarily a more metallic sound than you'd get with any old notebook but remember, this isn't any old notebook. For two grand, we'd expect some deeper bass notes and volume loud enough to entertain a guest or twenty.

Performance and graphics

Like the last Z, this year's model comes with your choice of standard voltage processors. It makes sense, given that the hard sell here is that you'll be getting a machine that purportedly offers no compromises in portability or performance. This time, as you can imagine, the processor options include Sandy Bridge CPUs. Our $2,749 tester machine came stocked with a 2.7GHz Core i7-2620M CPU, 4GB of RAM, dual 128GB SSDs, and integrated Intel graphics. That combination was enough to deliver a score of 11,808 in PCMark Vantage (11,855 with the Power Media Dock) -- either way, a roughly 25 percent gain over the current MacBook Air and a 56 percent improvement over the Series 9 we tested earlier this year.

Anecdotally, even without the Power Media Dock the Z didn't miss a beat as we jumped between tabs in Chrome, wrote emails, yammered away in Gchat, downloaded two games, edited a wiki page, watched YouTube and Hulu at full-screen, and installed two PC games. And, we booted into our Windows 7 desktop in an astonishingly fast 25 seconds. Throughout our testing, though, the fans spun so noisily that someone sitting nearby in our office stopped what he was doing to express concern. They became particularly insistent while we played Call of Duty 4 (and this was even after we lowered the resolution from 1080p to 1024 x 768), though they piped down as soon as we exited the game. Additionally, that vent on the left side gets hot to the touch, though the rest of the machine, fortunately, stays cool.

	PCMarkVantage	3DMark06	Battery Life
2011 Sony VAIO Z (2.7GHz Core i7-2620M, Intel HD Graphics 3000 / AMD Radeon HD 6650M)	11,808 / 11,855	4,339 / 7,955	4:15 / 8:43
2011 MacBook Air (1.7GHz Core i5-2557M, Intel HD Graphics 3000)	9,484	4,223	4:12
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 (2.5GHz Core i5-2520M, Intel HD Graphics 3000)	7,787	3,726	3:31 / 6:57
Samsung Series 9 (1.4GHz Core i5-2537M, Intel HD Graphics 3000)	7,582	2,240	4:20
ThinkPad X220 (2.5GHz Core i5-2520M, Intel HD Graphics 3000)	7,635	3,517	7:19
ASUS U36Jc (2.53GHz M460, NVIDIA GeForce 310M)	5,981	2,048 / 3,524	5:30
Toshiba Portege R705 (2.26GHz Core i3-350M, Intel HD Graphics 3000)	5,024	1,739 / 3,686	4:25
Notes: the higher the score the better. For 3DMark06, the first number reflects score with GPU off, the second with it on.

So as much as some spec junkies are bound to grouse about the laptop's internal Intel graphics card, the system's well-equipped to keep up with you the vast majority of the time. It's in areas such as gaming and HD video encoding that that Radeon HD graphics card is poised to save you a headache or two. For one thing, it helped the Z's 3DMark06 soar from 4,339 to 7,955. (In 3DMark11, which requires a DirectX11-capable card, it notched P1248 at 720p resolution and X430 at 1080p.)

The graphics oomph was just as obvious when we tried playing games with the Power Media Dock and then without it. In Call of Duty 4, for instance, we managed frame rates of 28 fps at 1080p resolution and a more playable 58 fps at 1600 x 900. When we disconnected the machine, though, those rates sank to 7 fps for 1080p and 16 fps for 1600 x 900. Even when we lowered the resolution to the default 1024 x 768, we still only eked out a sluggish 16 frames per second. Likewise, Batman: Arkham Asylum ran at a snail's pace (12 fps) unplugged, but rose to a more acceptable 30 fps with the help of the dock.
It should go without saying that whether or not you'll be able to manage without the dock depends on your routine. We Engadget editors find ourselves in the somewhat abnormal situation of having to edit HD video and batch edit photos on the go -- all while writing stories, talking to each other over IM, and running an endless series of web searches, of course. So ditching the discrete graphics card while unplugged might not be ideal, although even then we'd feel confident about doing most of those things, especially the multitasking and light photo editing. At the end of the day, we'd still prefer that discrete card for Photoshopping and editing video, though something like an Elgato Turbo h.264 stick for encoding movies could be a good enough solution. Whatever your lifestyle, it's a fair question to ask yourself, given that you can't upgrade the discrete card or add more video memory. Think hard about the graphics performance we've been describing, because you can either take it or leave it.

Configuration options

The Z starts at $1,969.99 with a 2.3GHz Core i5-2410M processor, 4GB of RAM, dual 64GB solid-state drives, a 1600 x 900 panel, and a DVD burner on the Power Media Dock. That 2.7GHz Core i7 processor in our test unit is a $250 upgrade, though if you don't want to spend quite that much you can opt for the 2.6GHz Core i5-2420M option for an additional hundred bucks. It'll also cost you $100 to boost the resolution to 1080p or upgrade to 6GB of RAM (getting the maximum 8GB will add $200 to the base cost). Other options include dual 128GB SSDs for $300, twin 512GB drives for $1,100, a mobile broadband module for $50, a Blu-ray player for $100, or a Blu-ray burner for $200. We hope you've been saving up.