You won't have any trouble fitting this into your hand luggage
By now the alarm bells should be ringing as a feather-light laptop inevitably packs a tiny battery - so you'll be pleasantly surprised to learn that the VGP-BPL11 Li-Ion battery has a claimed life of seven hours and a charge time of three and a half hours. We raised a quizzical eyebrow at these figures and ran loops of PCMark05 to get a battery life of four hours and five minutes. That’s constant heavy-duty use, and our rule of thumb says you can double the test figure to get a real-world battery figure - so Sony’s seven hours is, if anything, conservative.
Sony has achieved this remarkable figure by sticking religiously to Centrino Duo components that are based on a Core 2 Duo U series processor and an Intel 945GMS chipset with Intel GMA950 graphics.
There are three models in the TZ11 range that offer different specs of processor, memory, hard drive and, of course, in price. The VGN-TZ11 MN/N Platinum Sand has a U7500 processor running at 1.06GHz, 1GB of PC2-4300 RAM and an 80GB hard drive for a Sony Style price of £1,499 inc VAT. You can find it on sale elsewhere at £1349.
COMMENTS
what's new
Isn't this one fairly similar in size, specs (and price) to last year's TX3, now replaced by the TX5?
Herbert
Great for portability but frustatingly slow.
I got one recently. It is disappointingly slow but a great toy otherwise. Dr. Haq
Also worth considering, the Flybook V5 HSDPA
Cheaper, faster, tablet and laptop form factor, and built in HSDPA 3G comms. Just as cool and classy looking too...
Just got the model up
Don't know if it's any cheaper for you UK-fellows, but in Australia I ordered the Sony VGN-TZ90 from Japan. It's the model up; and the performance is notably better for simple processing tasks;
Main Changes:
- 2GB ram standard
- 32GB SSD HDD
- Wireless a/b/g/n
And with the extended battery (quoted 18hr, haven't had time to test that yet); it's quite an amazing thing to use. As for people above comparing to the TX- core 2 duo isn't a faster clock speed, but does result in faster performance for myself (running linux tho; kernel-level stuff on one core, user apps on the other...)
Also just got one
Very impressed with the look, feel and battery life. Didn't think there was much point going back to XP so I just removed most of the installed apps. Why they don't allow you to start off with just a clean install of Vista I don't know. Once most of these are stripped out performance is more impressive, with Vista welcoming you to sign in before it's time to take the teabag out.
Performance generally is not very impressive, but it was never going to be. I bought this specifically to take on travels with a digital camera - and with a 100gb HDD and built in SD reader it's perfect for that.
The fingerprint reader is also pretty neat, allowing you to log on/lock Windows with a swipe, and also to save website username/password combinations to replay later with another swipe. And I can't believe the review didn't mention the Webcam?! Possibly because it's so unobtrusive they may not have noticed it was there.
