Sony Vaio Z – GarageHP.com previously wrote articles about Philips 55PFL5706F7, HTC Status, and Samsung HMX-H105. Now we are talking about Sony Vaio Z, Inventive Docking Station. Sony’s high-end Z series laptop lives up to its luxury reputation, with a slim, lightweight body, plenty of processing power, and a highly specialized GPU dock.
Sony has a reputation for building excellent high-end laptops (and even the company’s less expensive models usually have a snazzy feel), but the Sony Vaio Z is truly the top of the Vaio line, starting at $2,000 for a thin 13-inch with decent specs and a sharp design.
The latest version of the Sony Vaio Z adds some very unusual new features. While the laptop itself looks and feels like a standard luxury 13-inch (its competition would be the MacBook Air or Samsung Series 9), it includes a separate docking station about the size of an Amazon Kindle e-book reader. That docking station includes a few extra ports and connections, as well as an optical drive (upgradable to Blu-ray), but more importantly, it has an AMD Radeon 6630M GPU built in.
Sony Vaio Z, Inventive Docking Station Review
When connected (via a cable that uses both the AC and USB 3.0 ports and a version of Intel’s Light Peak technology), the laptop can use the external GPU just as it would a built-in one. We’ve seen a few companies (such as Asus) try similar ideas in the past, but Sony is the first to built it into a the kind of fashionable consumer product you’d likely be able to find on a store shelf.
The setup works surprisingly well, although our package (which included the optional slice battery) had two separate A/C adaptors, only one of which fits the docking station. The stiff proprietary cable that connects the two components eats up the on-board USB 3.0 (but is replaced by another USB 3.0 port on the docking station).
We like that the Sony Vaio Z docking station is included by default with the Sony Vaio Z, it’s not a sold-separately add-on, but at the same time, it’s hard to imagine too many potential Vaio Z shoppers that are all that interested in adding gaming capabilities (especially via a deskbound docking station) to their high-fashion laptop. The Vaio Z is also crushingly expensive, which further limits the potential audience.
The slim, black carbon fiber body of the Sony Vaio Z actually looks quite different from the last Sony Vaio Z we reviewed. That model was thicker, with black keys against a silver finish, and a two-tone base. Its main claim to fame was the inclusion of a whopping 256GB SSD storage system, which drove the price up to $2,300. In comparison, the new Vaio Z looks and feels like an entirely different machine. In fact, it reminds us of an older Vaio, the TZ150, which was one of the last pre-Netbook $2,000-plus ultraportables back in 2007.
The matte black finish and slatelike chassis look great (and ditch the common Sony rounded-screen hinge), but at the same time, all the various joints and seams reminds us of how much we like the minimalism of Apple’s unibody construction.
The flat-topped keyboard will be familiar to anyone who has used a Sony Vaio laptop in the past several years (or a MacBook, for that matter). There is one important difference, however. Because the body of the laptop is so thin, the actual keys are extremely shallow–more so than we’ve seen on any laptop in recent memory. That made typing an awkward experience, at least until we got used to the design. It will not, however, ever become our favorite laptop for long-form writing.
Sony Vaio Z, Inventive Docking Station Laptop
The touch pad walks the line between the click-pad-style units found in some newer laptops and traditional touch pads with separate left and right mouse buttons. The pad itself has a subtle patterned texture, with attached, but nontextured, mouse buttons separated by a fingerprint reader. That added tactile feedback from the touchpad texture was just right for accurate cursor control, and we were surprised to find multitouch gestures, such as the two-finger scroll, worked better on this system than nearly any Windows laptop we’ve seen.
One of the highlights of the Vaio Z is the 13-inch display, which has a native resolution of 1,920×1,080 pixels–as high as laptop screens get, even massive 18-inch desktop replacements. A less expensive 1,600×900-pixel option is also available, and may even be a better idea. On the 1080p screen, text could be so small it was hard to read, and even with the external GPU, running newer games at the highest possible resolution would be a challenge. For Blu-ray or other HD video playback, however, it’s great.
The 5.1 built-in speakers include a small subwoofer and the overall audio quality is excellent–if you keep in mind this is a small laptop with little room for air-pushing speaker cones. For personal use, it’s fine, but immersive gaming or cinephile video watching would be better served with a set of high-end headphones.
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