Gadgetory

hi I'm Scott Stein and what I have in front of me here is the sony vaio s series 13 p now that's a mouthful for a line that has been around for a couple of years now the vaio s is Sony's mid-range to slightly premium laptop line it's a step above the e series they have a 13 and 15 inch model an important thing to know is that these aren't ultrabooks this 13-inch laptop is a regular laptop which means that it's got a full voltage processor and some more features that you're not going to find on an ultrabook you know you're going to have an optical drive you're going to have better graphics you're gonna have a larger hard drive that type of stuff and the vaio s previously was kind of a mixed bag the ones I had looked at tended to have middling battery life that required you to buy an extra slice battery for a hundred fifty dollars more and some features that were okay but didn't really stand out that much from the pack the new vos comes in three different flavors starting as low as 799 but the one I reviewed is the premium edition that starts at eleven nineteen the configuration I looked at is 1199 now that matches up with a 13-inch MacBook Pro what you get here I think is a lot more impressive than one apple offers in the macbook pro in fact it's the feature set I wanted in the first place this is 3.7 pounds a lot lighter than the 4 plus pounds you get on fuller size laptops this has a slot-loading optical drive it has a new core i5 processor 640 gigabyte hard drive six gigs of ram nvidia geforce 640 graphics which are really nice although they're not super spectacular they get the job done and you also get a higher resolution 1600 x 900 display so you get higher resolution graphics and you also can get a slightly larger desktop for your 13 inch screen it's kind of like the sweet spot and even better the battery life on this is much improved I've got about five hours five and a half hours plus running our tests which is good enough to get you going for a day it's not super spectacular but it's definitely far far better and you know what more would you ask for there's a larger trackpad it's a little finicky but it's much better than what it existed before backlit keyboard and there you go now I might have some quibbles about the strange speed / stamina toggle switch up your message to Sony that's a really confusing button and not really need it anymore because within video graphics there's a fix switching already and you can tweak your performance settings internally so what does this really do it's kind of a physical toggle that you don't really need and clutters up the space a tiny bit the sony vaio s is a really good laptop this time around and the 13 p might be a little bit too premium for some that's got things like TPM if you don't know what that is you don't need it it's got a fingerprint reader and some optional SSD storage capabilities but that's really for a lot of small business use I think you might want to go with the enhanced version instead check out Sony site for their somewhat confusing layout of pricing options I'm Scott Steiner that's a look at the new 2012 sony vaio s 13 inch