Sony launched their updated Vaio Z lines today in my country and I attended the event and got the chance to play with it for a minute or two, as you’ll see in the clip included further down.
All in all, Sony claim they managed to create the best business laptop on the market. And they might actually be right, as I can’t think of anything faster or better built now.
Now, in terms of exterior, nothing changed over the previous Z line, as we have the same carbon fiber body, solid chassis, isolated keyboard with illumination and overall slender body. Still, there are a lot of new things inside:
- the 13.1 inch LED backlit keyboard now features Full HD 1920 x 1080 px resolution
- you get the Core i7-640M processor
- hybrid graphics with Intel HD graphics and Nvidia 330M (with manual switching or an automatic mode, which should work in the same way as Optimus does)
- 4 SSD drives in RAID 0, for a total of 256 GB of storage space
- 6 GB DDR3 memory
- BluRay burner
- Wi-Fi N, Bleutooth 2.1, Vaio Everywair, HSUPA (3G)
- Windows 7 Professional
- up to 6 hours battery life
Sony Vaio Z – perhaps the best business portable laptop on the market right now
All these specs might not tell much, but in practice, this is by far the fastest notebook I ever laid my eyes on. The shear power of the CPU and that graphic options used on such a small computer make it able to run all kind of apps, multimedia content (including Blu-Ray disks – which it can also output to a bigger display via HDMI) and games (tried Modern Warfare and worked flawlessly on 1366 x 768 with medium details).
However, what really impresses is the speed of that storage solution, with 4 SSD units in RAID 0. With it, even the most power hungry app should load in a matter of seconds, while everyday ones will load instantly (a mission in Modern warfare 2 loaded at least 5 times faster than on my Core 2 Duo E8400 with 7200 rpm HDD desktop back home). There’s a clip below with more details about that, where i open a couple of Office apps (it’s not in English, but should do the deal). Haven’t been able to test transfer speeds, but expect them to impress you.
However, power and specs are not enough to make the Vaio Z the best business notebook on the market. Not even features like storage drop protection, docking ability and fingerprint reader with an impossible to crack coding system. But build quality, attention to details and complex intense testing in order to be sure that each unit is as its utterly best possible do.
You should know that the Z is only manufactured in Japan, assembled and tested there as well, in Sony’s Nagano facility. Sony actually claim that each Z must pass over 40 different tests before leaving for stores, like:
- thermal tests: devices are sealed in a thermal room and tested for 24 hours on temperatures from -40 to 95 degrees Celsius
- dust tests – getting the units in extreme dusty environments in order to make sure that cooling and parts are not affected
- drop test – the new Z can withstand drops from 90 cm without taking any damage
- electromagnetic tests – they make sure that the notebooks are safe to use by monitoring electromagnetic radiation levels for each unit
Looks good and is extremely well built, but the real goodies lie inside the new Vaio Z series
Of course, all these sound impressive and I must say that I could hardly find any flaw on the Vaio Z. In fact, the only thing i didn’t quite like is the keyboard, where keys are slightly more spaced than on regular chiclet keyboards, but that should be OK once you get used to it. And there’s the fact that battery takes like 4 hours to fully load, which is a problem with all Vaio devices, ever since they had problems with batteries exploding a couple of years ago.
There is however one more aspect: price. Being the best, you would expect the Vaio Z to be expensive, but the top version with all the features mentioned above goes for $4000+ . And yeah, this is a business notebook and at this level money are not really a problem, but still, there are a lot more other things you can do with 4000 buckaroos… Luckily, there are some cheaper versions as well, that’s if you can call $1800+ price tags cheap…
All in all though, I was really impressed with the Z on this short first encounter. I do hope I might get more time with it in the next weeks and be able to run some tests, so I’ll get back with extra details on the Vaio Z top business laptop soon.
