Sony VAIO T13

Sony VAIO T13: A Middle-of-the-Road Ultrabook

Sony VAIO T13 Review

Long before many other laptop vendors began experimenting with netbooks and ultraportables, Sony was making skinny, lightweight laptops--many with small screens, most of them rather pricey. Its first Ultrabook, the VAIO T13, is neither exceptionally small nor expensive at a starting price of $799 (as of June 4, 2012). With its decided consumer bent (including hybrid storage), it shapes up as a laptop worth considering if you just want to dip your toe in the Ultrabook category and avoid full immersion.

Outfitted with a 13.3-inch, 1366-by-768-pixel widescreen display, an Intel Core i5-3317U CPU and its companion HD4000 graphics hardware, 4GB of RAM, and hybrid storage (a 500GB hard drive cached by 32GB of flash storage), the VAIO T13 earned a respectable score of 123 on WorldBench 7, and a mark of 77 in overall performance (including battery life and game performance). That's about what you'd expect from an Ivy Bridge configuration with hybrid storage instead of a full solid-state drive.

It's worth mentioning that a couple of laptops with previous-generation Sandy Bridge CPUs and solid-state drives scored better, reflecting the impact on benchmarks from data-transfer speeds between drives and memory (as opposed to raw computing power alone).

People who keep a lot of applications and files on their computer will appreciate the roomy hard drive--and for many tasks, you're not sacrificing huge performance gains to get it. In fact, the T13 turned in above-average scores on office productivity, Web performance, and most content-creation components of WorldBench 7; it lost ground, however, in storage-related tasks (file copy, paste, and compression), where that poky hard disk clearly came into play.

Startup time (around 18 seconds) and battery life (about 6.5 hours in our tests) are both good, as we'd expect for an Ultrabook with a hybrid drive. Gaming scores, too, were generally average for the class. Sony touts the T13's ability to sleep for up to ten days, but we weren't able to test that claim.

In short, you don't get performance bragging rights with the T13, but unless you perform a lot of hard-disk-intensive file operations, there's little cause for complaint. Also, you could probably get a little more speed out of the T13 by adding extra memory; Sony lets you expand the default 4GB to up to 8GB, an option you don't always have with an Ultrabook.

Physically the T13 takes some of its design cues from, predictably, the MacBook Air--most notably the champagne color of its case, made of a brushed-aluminum lid and magnesium everywhere else except for the plastic bezel. However, Sony opted for more-squared edges all around, giving the T13 a somewhat chunky feeling even though its 0.8-inch thickness is about average for the category and its 3.4-pound weight (without accessories) makes it a few ounces lighter than the average ultraportable (but a few ounces heavier than the typical Ultrabook of this size).

The T13's touchpad is clickable and supports multitouch operations such as pinching and zooming; I found it pleasingly responsive and easier to use than touchpads that don't give you the tactile feedback of a light mechanical click. The keyboard is less impressive: While the keys are sufficiently large and well spaced, they're almost completely flat and have little travel. Some sculpting would have been nice.

Sony places three small bar-shaped buttons atop the right half of the standard QWERTY layout. The leftmost button, labeled Assist, affords access to VAIOCare, Sony's self-guided help and troubleshooting app. The second button launches your default Web browser, and the third (labeled 'VAIO', somewhat enigmatically) can launch whatever application you want, although by default it asks you to choose between VAIO Media Gallery or PlayMemories software for managing and playing multimedia.

Another unusual interface option is VAIO Gesture Control, technology that uses the built-in 1.3-megapixel video camera to view hand gestures for controlling navigation and other functions on supported apps--Internet Explorer 9, Media Gallery, PowerDVD, PowerPoint, and Windows Media Player, according to the documentation.

In my tests, after going through the tutorial and initial setup, I was unable to get this feature to work. The camera had a tendency to shut itself down for no apparent reason, and even when the camera was active, nothing happened when I tried to scroll through a PowerPoint presentation by waving, or when I attempted to pause or change the volume on a Windows Media Player song. The documentation offers a number of reasons why the technology might not work, ranging from poor lighting to too much or too little distance between your hand and the display, but a feature that's so difficult to deploy is probably not quite ready for prime time.

Good for Multimedia

The T13 does have decent multimedia chops, however. The audio system, as enhanced by Sony, produces satisfyingly full-bodied sound, and video plays smoothly. The screen offers good visibility from side to side, although the result isn't quite as good when you move up and down. The aforementioned USB camera provides a range of controls to help you get the lighting, hue, and exposure into shape. Unfortunately, the images it captures can become a bit blurry if you move around a lot; frequent Skype callers should still consider investing in a higher-quality webcam.

Sony packed in some connectivity hardware that you don't always get with an Ultrabook, including HDMI and VGA ports, plus a reader for SD and Memory Stick cards, all along the right edge of the T13. More typical are the pair of USB ports (one 2.0, one 3.0) located on the left edge, and the gigabit ethernet port and headphone jack situated on the right edge. In addition to Bluetooth 4.0, the T13 supports 802.11n Wi-Fi--but only on the crowded 2.4GHz band. For a city dweller like me, living in a neighborhood with several dozen 2.4GHz networks competing for a mere three nonoverlapping channels (not to mention the potential for interference from Bluetooth, microwave ovens, and some cordless phones), a network based on the much wider 5GHz band would almost certainly be an improvement.

Sony's software bundle is filled with gadgets such as the previously mentioned PlayMemories and VAIO Gate (which creates a customizable dock at the top edge of the display), but none are particularly superior to the free Windows alternatives. (Remember, you can already set up easy access to apps and pages you like by using the Windows taskbar.) You get a 30-day trial of Kaspersky antivirus and the starter edition of Microsoft Office, too.

In general, the Sony VAIO T13 straddles the blurry lines between all-purpose, thin-and-light, and Ultrabook portables with reasonable skill. It compromises a bit on performance due to the hybrid drive, and some of the ergonomics could be better, but it delivers the lightweight design, the fairly roomy storage space, and (except for its lack of 5GHz Wi-Fi) the various connectivity options that are popular with consumers--all at an uncharacteristically (for Sony) affordable price. People who like the idea of an Ultrabook but don't want to sacrifice a lot of traditional features should give it a look

HP Folio 13

HP Folio 13 Review: An Ultrabook for the Masses

HP Folio 13 Review,

HP's Folio 13, the first of a new product line designed to appeal to both mainstream and business users, isn't the thinnest or lightest Ultrabook around. But unless you're a fanatic about such things, it will probably fill your needs better than its thinner and lighter competitors. It offers excellent performance and battery life, a fetchingly minimalist design, and a typing experience that thinner units can't match.

Our $899 (as of February 20, 2012) consumer configuration of the Folio 13 revolves around an Intel Core i5-2467M, 4GB of 1333 MHz DDR3, and a performance-enhancing 128GB Samsung solid-state drive. The display is flawlessly backlit and crisp, at 13.3 inches with a resolution of 1366 by 768. The $999 business version adds features such as a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) for security, a cleaner software image, and Windows 7 Professional rather than Windows 7 Home Premium.

The Folio 13's WorldBench 6 score of 118 is good for a Core i5-based machine, and in informal use the unit feels quite snappy. The integrated Intel HD 3000 graphics contribute to weak gaming frame rates, which top out in the low 30s at 800 by 600 resolution with low quality settings. Video, on the other hand, is smooth as silk, even when playing 1080p files. The battery lasts a healthy 6 hours, 46 minutes. If you need more time, though, you'll need to locate a power plug: The Folio 13 doesn't have a user-replaceable battery.

The Folio 13 comes with one USB 2.0 port and one USB 3.0 port. Though both are black, the USB 3.0 port is marked underneath with the SuperSpeed USB logo. A single HDMI port is available to accommodate external displays, and there's an SD slot for loading photos and such. A mobile-device-style mini-jack that combines headphones and mic into a single plug handles audio input and output. The microphone next to the 1280-by-1024-resolution webcam also accepts audio input. Connectivity is top-notch with gigabit ethernet, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 3.0 on board.

The Folio 13's keyboard has a nice feel, primarily because the keys can travel farther than on ultrathin laptops, but there's little flex to the unit as a whole, which contributes to a more stable typing platform. The single-piece touchpad is appealing, too, but resistance--to dragging and to clicking--is a tad greater than on most laptops. The Folio 13 travels at 4 pounds including the AC adapter, as against an average of 3.7 pounds for the Ultrabooks PCWorld has reviewed.

HP displays a pull-quote (from another publication) on the Folio 13's Web page that calls the Folio 13's sound "fantastic". Listening through the headphones, one might conceivably make that argument. But the speakers? No way. Audio through them is loud but more than a tad muddy. Superlatives such as "fantastic" should be reserved for laptops such as the Toshiba Qosmio X775 3D, which has a subwoofer that can reproduce bass tones sans the headphones. Still, the Folio 13's audio is a cut above the horrible sound you get from the speakers on most Ultrabooks.

In stark contrast to the Folio 13's minimalist outward design is the busy Windows 7 Home Premium desktop you encounter when you first boot up. Shortcuts to eBay, HP Games (Wild Tangent), RaRa music, Zya music, and HP downloads--as well as a number of more staid HP utilities and Microsoft Office 2010 Starter Edition--look gaudy in contrast to the elegant externals. HP's background images don't match the unit's appearance particularly well either.

The Folio 13 is a solid effort from HP that, instead of blindly shedding features and usability in the name of thin-and-light, strikes a reasonable balance. It's probably a tad pricey for some shoppers, but including a solid-state drive always drives up a laptop's price. This model should definitely be on your short list of Ultrabooks to consider.

Asus Zenbook UX31E

Asus Zenbook UX31E: Supersleek Ultrabook With a Crummy Touchpad

Asus Zenbook UX31E Review,

Asus's supersleek Ultrabook, the Zenbook UX31E, is finally here--and it's gorgeous. With its brushed-aluminum design, it more closely resembles the MacBook Air than other Ultrabooks do, and it really does elicit a Zen-like feeling. Throw in an i5 processor, Bluetooth 4.0, and a USB 3.0 port, and the Zenbook UX31E is almost--but not quite--perfect.

Our review model, priced at $1099 (as of November 15, 2011), sports an Intel Core i5-2557M processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 128GB solid-state drive. It also features a built-in 0.3-megapixel webcam, a microphone, and 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi.

Performance-wise, the Zenbook UX31E is surprisingly robust considering its sleek form. In our WorldBench 6 benchmark suite, the Zenbook earned a score of 125--better than several of our top-rated ultraportable laptops, including the Samsung Series 9 (which had a mark of 103), the Asus U36S (114), and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 (124). This result also makes it slightly faster than the other Ultrabooks we’ve tested so far.

The Zenbook has no discrete graphics card, and therefore relies on Intel's integrated graphics (as most ultraportables do). Graphics performance is slightly below average for the category: In our Far Cry 2 graphics tests, the Zenbook managed a frame rate of 31.4 frames per second (at low quality settings and 800-by-600-pixel resolution). That frame rate is below average for the past few ultraportables we've tested, but not too far below. Still, it means that the Zenbook won't satisfy gamers.

The Zenbook UX31E is a breathtaking computer, different in appearance from Apple's MacBook Air series in a few key respects. The ultrathin chassis features a slate-gray aluminum cover with a circular brushed design and sharp corners. The size, the tapered design, and the metallic look make the Zenbook resemble the MacBook Air to such an extent that you’d be forgiven for mistaking them at a glance. The interior ditches the concentric-circles pattern in favor of bright silvery brushed aluminum on the deck, a dark matte-gray bezel around the screen, and a silver glass-coated touchpad. The UX31E sports a Chiclet-style keyboard in matte silver.

That keyboard, which is not backlit, is comfortable and easy to type on. The keys are large with sharp corners, and widely spaced. You'll find no extra buttons around the keyboard, but the Function keys can serve as extra buttons--for example, you can put the computer to sleep, turn the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth on or off, and adjust volume and screen brightness using the Fn keys. The power button looks like a regular key, and is located in the top-right corner of the keyboard.

The glass-coated touchpad looks and feels a lot like Apple's trackpads. The Zenbook's has a small black line in the middle, at the bottom, to denote the left- and right-click zones. Although the touchpad is smooth and supports multitouch gestures such as two-finger scrolling, it needs some work. When I first tested the touchpad, it had a tendency to overshoot objects on the screen, and it produced a significant delay in the tap-to-click function. A driver update to coincide with the Zenbook's launch fixes these issues...to a degree. The mouse no longer overshoots, but the cursor is slow and takes a long time to travel across the screen (even after you adjust the cursor speed in the Mouse Settings panel). Also, even though the tap-to-click delay has been shortened, the slight lag is still obvious and annoying. It doesn't crop up when you depress the designated left- or right-mouse-click areas.

The Zenbook has a nice selection of ports for an ultra-ultraportable. It offers two USB ports--one of them USB 3.0--as well as a mini-VGA port, a Micro HDMI port, and a headphone jack. You'll also find an SD Card reader, which is a big plus on such a sliver of a machine.

The UX31E is an impressively slim 0.8 inch thick at its thickest point, and merely 0.12 inch thick at the very front. That's just slightly thicker than the current 13-inch MacBook Air, which is 0.68 inch at its thickest (0.12 inch at its thinnest). The Zenbook UX31E weighs 3.1 pounds, only 0.14 pound heavier than the 13-inch MacBook Air. With the power brick, the Zenbook weighs 3.8 pounds, which is just enough to make your shoulder hurt after a while. In PCWorld's tests, however, the Zenbook managed to chug along on its battery for a good 6.5 hours, so you may not need to haul around the half-pound power brick.

The Zenbook's glossy, 13.3-inch screen has a native resolution of 1600 by 900 pixels, and is very bright and crisp. That’s a bit higher resolution than on some of the other Ultrabooks we've seen, which feature 1366-by-768-pixel displays. However, color representation isn't fantastic: The entire screen has a slightly bluish tint, especially at higher brightness levels, and skin tones look a little burnt.

Multimedia playback on the Zenbook is quite good. In my tests, streaming HD video played without any hiccups, though at full screen it had some minor artifacting and loss of detail. Audio playback is good for an ultraportable machine: The speakers, which are located above the keyboard in the hinge of the computer, are loud and surprisingly full-sounding. A slight echo is audible at the highest volume.

The Zenbook is nicely free of bloatware, though you do get an Asus Utility suite, which includes FaceLogOn software and a 100-page electronic manual.

The Asus Zenbook UX31E is impressive: It's an excellent performer, it's attractive and light, and it plays back multimedia well. Unfortunately, its screen is off-color and its touchpad needs some more work (or perhaps another driver update).

HP Envy 14 Spectre

HP Envy 14 Spectre Review: Beefing Up the Ultrabook

HP Envy 14 Spectre Review

First impressions are important, and the HP Envy 14 Spectre makes a great one. The glossy, glass-topped display bezel and keyboard tray look elegant and understated, and the uniform, thin chassis gives the laptop a sleek appearance. Second impressions are a little less positive, though: When you pick up the Spectre, it seems heftier than you’d expect. That’s because HP covered it in impact-resistant glass, similar to what you might see on a high-end smartphone. That pretty glass top is a fingerprint magnet, too.

Encapsulating the monitor bezel in glass, however, allowed HP to build a 14-inch display into tight quarters--the Specre offers essentially the same width and length as most 13.3-inch Ultrabooks do. HP took advantage of the bigger display area, packing in a 1600-by-900-pixel native-resolution LED-backlit IPS panel. It looks great, and it offers superb video playback fidelity. Rather than matching the tapered shape of many competitors, the Spectre is just under 0.9 inch thin (barely meeting the Ultrabook specs that Intel set) throughout, which makes the system seem somehow larger than other laptops in its class. It also weighs more than many Ultrabooks (a spot-on 4 pounds without the power brick), partly due to the glass surface and partly because of the larger LCD panel.

The LCD panel offers excellent horizontal viewing angles, and good vertical viewing from above the laptop. If you look from below the plane of the sweet spot, however, color and contrast shifting are severe. The screen is very evenly lit, probably owing to the LED backlight. Color saturation is good, and video looks quite nice, particularly high-definition video. The 1600-by-900-pixel display also makes editing photos a bit easier than systems with a more standard 1366-by-768-pixel display typically do. You can put that display to good use right away, since HP includes full versions of Photoshop Elements 10 and Premiere Elements 10.

Performance, on the other hand, is a little disappointing, trailing behind that of similar systems in the class, such as the Dell XPS 13. The Spectre posted a mark of 106 on WorldBench 7, the second-lowest in comparison with four similar Ultrabooks, but good overall performance nonetheless. Plus, the Envy 14 generated slightly lower scores in our Web-performance tests. The higher-resolution display likely has some impact on performance, but having all those extra pixels makes up a little for the slightly lower scores. Battery life was about average for the class, at 6 hours, 29 minutes.

Like most Ultrabooks, the Envy 14 Spectre is somewhat lacking in expansion ports, offering a scant two USB connections (one USB 3.0 and the other USB 2.0). All of the system's ports, including the two USB ports, the gigabit ethernet jack, the headphone jack, the SD Card slot, and the HDMI and mini-DisplayPort video outputs, are on the left side. I would like to see at least four USB connections on these units--the chipset supports that, and the Spectre certainly has enough chassis real estate for them.

The base model of the Spectre includes a 128GB solid-state drive; HP offers a 256GB SSD as an option. You won't find a built-in optical drive, but that’s pretty typical for this class of system. Connectivity comes in the form of 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, and wired ethernet. HP doesn’t offer an option for built-in LTE or any other wireless broadband technology.

Audio is a mixed bag. At moderate volume, HP’s Beats Audio equalization system enables music and movie content that sounds richer than on most laptop speakers, but if you crank the volume past about 60 percent, you can hear noticeable speaker distortion. If you want louder audio, you’ll need to use headphones. The Spectre offers a convenient analog-style volume dial on the right side.

Like most Ultrabooks, the Envy 14 Spectre uses Intel’s HD 3000 graphics technology, so it’s suitable for only light-duty PC gaming at lower resolutions and detail levels.

The keyboard offers an excellent feel, although the spacebar is slightly recessed, which results in mashed-together words when you miss pressing the spacebar all the way down. The touchpad is one of the best we’ve seen on a Windows laptop, coming close to the feel and usability of the larger trackpads built into Apple’s MacBook Air. Full support for multitouch gestures, proper button sensitivity, and tapping anywhere to make a right mouse click are welcome.

You’ll need to weigh a few trade-offs with the Spectre: It has a bit more heft and slightly reduced performance compared with most Ultrabooks, but it also offers a much better display, a good keyboard, and an excellent pointing device. It’s also not inexpensive, with the base unit costing about $1299 (as of March 29, 2012), so you should factor that in as well. In the end, HP’s Envy 14 Spectre falls just short of being a classic--but it doesn’t disappoint, either.