Brand conscious - Review of the New Sony Vaio NW 13G

The Sony Vaio is for many an aspirational brand, something they dream of buying someday. But for some time, some people also associated some risk with the brand as they were not sure about the kind of service they would get for the money they were paying. All that is passé, as Sony has not only made their laptops more affordable, but also revamped their service side, making Vaio the brand to buy if you are looking for a machine that carries a luxury tag and gives value for money. And nothing epitomises this effort better than the new Sony Vaio NW 13G.

The new texture, two-tone colour and clear touchpad make the NW 13G a stylish machine. It features a Pentium Mobile Processor, T4200 2GHz with 1 MB Cache, a 15.5” widescreen Clear Bright LCD and 2GB RAM that can be upgraded to 8GB. But the 15.5” felt under-powered on 2GB; I would have made it at least 3GB, anything more would be a waste as the Windows Vista 32Bit Home Edition in the machine won’t be able to use it. The best option would be to fit two 4GB RAMs and run the machine in dual channel mode.
The 15.5” screen only supports a maximum of 1366x768 pixels. It also has a webcam, sadly only .5 megapixel, good for online chats and video conferencing, but not if you want to click a self portrait. The battery time on the machine is touted at 3.5 hours and I was able to squeeze about three hours, a bit low for a machine weighing 2.7 kg. The battery time also depends on how much you use the optical drive and wireless and at what brightness you run the machine.

To cut the price, Sony has put in only a 160GB hard disk, which I think works well for home users. It also features a DVD-RW drive as standard, though the card reader reads just Sony memory. There is a shortcut key on the top of the keyboard to launch the web browser, so that you don’t have to move around to log on to Internet—but I couldn’t see the utility value of the key. There are, however, mute and display off buttons, both of which are very handy. It also has an HDMI output so that you can hook it to a large LCD or Plasma screen without searching for S-Video and audio cables.
However, at Rs 37,990, I will recommend this machine only if you wanted a Vaio real bad, if you fell in love with the looks of the machine or if you wanted something to power your large screen TV.

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The above review appeared in the Indian Express, on Sunday 27th September 2009