The carbon fibre casing is extremely durable
Then there’s the VGN-TZ11 XN/B Natural Black that we’re reviewing that has 2GB of RAM in a single module and a 100GB hard drive at the eye-watering prince of £1,799, although you can find it for £1,589. Finally, we have the VGN-TZ11 VN/X Black carbon fibre, which is an XN/B with a 1.20GHz U7600 processor that will ‘be coming soon’ at a price of £1,899 inc VAT.
Sony is charging an epic price for a tiny laptop so it’s fair to ask what it delivers for your truckload of cash. Happily, the answer is "quite a lot, actually".
The tiny chassis includes a dual layer DVD writer that nestles into the right hand side, just in front of the VGA port. The back of the Sony is fully occupied by the battery, but the left side is riddled with ports.
Under a cover you’ll find modem and Gigabit LAN ports and a mini Firewire, there’s an Express Card/34 slot under another cover, and two exposed USB 2.0 ports, which is impressive enough, but the real action takes place at the front. There are two mini jacks for headphones and microphone so Skype users are well catered, two memory card slots, and a flick switch to disable wireless.
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.
