The Vaio W netbook falls just short

Anthony Caruana
Monday, 10 May 2010 18:40

Your IT - Mobility

Sony's VAIO W series netbook is a well made, attractive notebook with a sensational display and great performance. It's not perfect but will suit the vast majority of netbook users.

With the cover down, the VAIO W would pass as just about any 10.1 inch netbook. Our review unit's matte black lid was scratch resistant. The rest of the body came in the same black with some grey trim. There's a power switch on the front edge with LEDs for the battery, AC and wireless LAN switch and status indicator. One the lower edge there's SD and MagicGate slots. The left side is home to the VGA connector, mic and headphone jacks with the right holding the ethernet and a pair of USB ports. That's a minor issue - most netbooks deliver three USB ports.

Once the lid's open, the chiclet keyboard and touchpad are ready to use. With the machine on, the VAIO W's biggest strength comes to the fore. The bright, clear 1366 by 768 LED-lit display is one of the best in the netbook market. For business users, this equates to lots more visible spreadsheet than the standard 1024 by 600 resolution the majority of netbooks operate at.

For viewing documents, looking at photos and watching videos - the screen simply excelled at everything. Video performance was as good as we've seen on a netbook. Our testing, with high definition 1080p WMV movie didn't pixelate or have any problems when played in fullscreen.

Performance was excellent. Driven by an Intel N450 processor clocked at 1.66GHz with IGB of memory, the VAIO W coped with everything we'd expect from a netbook. Add in another stick of memory would give Windows 7 a nice boost.