Aesthetic

The pictures we’ve been given reveal a smooth, round-cornered aluminium/magnesium chassis, with the familiar VAIO logo carved across the top. These ultrabooks are beautiful, which is only to be expected given the previous non-ultrabook VAIO models. Laptops no longer need to be clunky to be powerful; while ultrabooks won’t be the first choice for those wanting to play the latest games, they manage to be more than functional enough for the average user while still being stylish enough not to cause embarrassment when pulled from your bag at your local café.

At a closer look, you’ll be presented with a beautiful (if standard, nowadays) LED screen, with plenty of rich colours to display your photos and films. The touchpad is large, meaning it can be used comfortably, and button-free. Just like that on a MacBook Air, this touchpad is made for intuitive gesture control, rather than the two-buttoned formula of the past. As far as ports go, the VAIO T has two USB (one 2.0, one 3.0) and one HDMI out; this is fairly typical for these ultrabooks, which are so small the physical space in which to position these ports is limited. There is also no optical drive.

Performance

With a 320GB hard drive and 4GB of RAM, the VAIO T ultrabooks should have no problem in installing and running large programs. The drive itself will come in two varieties: a quickly-accessible solid-state drive (SSD), or a hard disk drive/SSD hybrid, which will combine the greater HDD storage space with speedy SSD cache memory. Ultrabooks are made to be instantly usable, for meetings, lectures, etc., so the VAIO T’s ‘Rapid Wake + Eco’, which puts the ultrabook into an energy-efficient sleep mode when the lid is closed, is is a crucial feature.

The rest of what the VAIO T has to offer is similarly standard fare, including an integrated HD webcam, for clear viewing ‘even at night under the dim lights of your bedroom’. The battery life is given as up to nine hours for the SSD models, though that obviously depends on how many programs you plan on having running, your preferred screen brightness, etc.

Conclusion

The VAIO T Series are beautiful, functional little laptops, but with Intel’s new Ivy Bridge processors due to start appearing in ultrabooks over the next few months, it may well be that all those equipped with Sandy Bridge become obsolete before the VAIO T even has a chance to make a mark. It’s a shame, but with technological advancements in laptops moving along so quickly, a new model needs to have some sort of truly innovative feature in order to stand out, and it looks like the Sony VAIO is likely to just end up being lost in the crowd.