Gadgetory

hey I'm Scott Stein senior editor at cnet and laptops are in a funny place right now because there are newer Ivy Bridge processors that are somewhere on the horizon meanwhile we're starting to see some laptops of bumped up specs from last year that are a little better than what you had before but maybe not that fantastically better great example is the sony vaio sa 41 FX / BL that incredibly arcane name boils down to the sony vaio s is a 13-inch laptop that comes in two different flavors the essay is a more expensive variety that's geared a little more towards small business and the SB which probably one you want to buy is not this one it starts at seven ninety-nine that's a pretty palatable area the problem with the essay is that for its feature set while it is impressive a 1600 x 900 13 inch display that's higher resolution a fingerprint reader in the middle it's also got optional blu-ray drive a blu-ray reader if you want to pay up for that and SSD storage as a whole the laptop is a bit expensive the starting price as a thousand 29 it does have built-in graphics AMD graphics that are actually pretty good for gaming so this isn't really a gaming laptop and the size is it in between ur it's a 13-inch that has an optical drive it's lighter than a macbook pro it's about 3.5 pounds but it's not as thin or as light as an ultrabook although super thin no optical drive laptops that you've seen all over the place costing also about a thousand dollars which brings up the question why would you want this over an ultrabook definitely the graphics performance lots of nice features but the battery life built in battery lasted about four hours that's really not great now for laptops you can get a slice battery for this that will upgrade the battery life to double that roughly but it costs 150 dollars and it bulks up the thickness so what do you really want to do I mean I would prefer using integrated batteries and paying up for the battery life a macbook air is I get seven hours of battery life and you know when you have that out there it's hard to deal with four hours internally now let me make fun of this vaio laptop it is clean-cut looking but it's kind of a bit throw back the lines on this for me are really angular almost feel like a like a laptop from a couple of years ago plus Sony loves these buttons there are a ton of dedicated buttons on the top of this laptop including this weirdo switch that says stamina speed you can flip it to speed or stamina I bet we both want stamina and speed right but you can't pick both really what this is is just the ability to turn dedicated graphics on and off going from AMD to integrated Intel of course you have no idea what that means when you see stamina speed classic weird switch that you wouldn't see on a lot of other laptops that have that feature built-in otherwise it's actually a pretty nice laptop just a bit expensive and the battery life can be better i'm scott stein and as a look at the sony vaio sa 41 FX / BL thank you very much