Hands on with the new Sony SZ Dual Core Laptop

Michael Gartenberg | February 02, 2006, 12:08 PM

Sony's an interesting company, often we see products from them that are more akin to concept cars seen at auto shows. Very cool designs but often not practical. Like concept cars, however, Sony often takes some of the best features and brings them into mainstream products. The SZ laptop series is a perfect example of that and it's an amazing computer.

I've been using a pre-production version of the premium SZ model. The unit is light, weighing in at 3.75 lbs and with the carbon fiber casing only .93" thick. That's pretty small for a machine this capable. The specs include a new Intel Dual Core processor running at 1.83ghz with @MB of L2 cache, a 13.3 LCD running at 1280x800 (backlit by LEDs so it's razor thin and super power efficient), a gig of RAM and a 100gb drive. It's also got a dual side DVD burner. 802.11 a/b/g and Bluetooth. For connections there's a full size VGA adapter, two USB ports, FireWire, MemoryStick and a new PC Express slot (similar to the one on the new MacBook Pro) Sony tosses in a universal card reader for the PC Express slot so you can read SDs and the like and there's also a full sized PC Card slot for things like current generation EVDO cards. There's also the standard modem and Ethernet ports. Final units will also have integrated EDGE based WAN connectivity but that feature was not enabled on my pre-production machine.

The graphics system is unique as there's a dual chipset, a combination of the NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400 and Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950. Yep, two graphics chips that you can easily toggle between. When you need performance, go with the NVIDIA stuff and when you want extra battery life, toggle to the integrated Intel stuff. This is the first system I've ever seen with this capability and it's really sweet. It also means this unit should be very capable of running Vista with all features on.

Batter life is excellent, Sony claims up to seven hours with the standard battery and there's higher capacity unit available to boost that to10.5 hours. My early unit is getting well over five hours of use, so I have no problem believing the figures for the production models. Thanks to the combination of Dual Core and a speedy GPU, this unit flies. Sony asked me not to benchmark since it's not a final unit but this thing is fast. Very fast. Screen is bright and clear using Sony's XBrite technology. My only complaint is that the keyboard is not up to par with what I'm used to on the ThinkPad that I use for most tasks. It's not to say it's not good or acceptable, just not best of breed in my opinion.

Laptops are hard machines to make. There's a tough balance between features, performance and size. Notebook under four pounds tend to lose feature, like high resolution screens, DVD burners and fast processors. Larger systems compromise on form factor and battery life. The SZ series is a real breakthrough, combining good looks, excellent weight and form factor and a combination of features designed to meet the needs of demanding users. The fact that there's a solid GPU and PC Express slots means that this is also a class of machine that should be capable of dealing with whatever comes down the road as well. I'm planning to take the SZ on my next few road trips and I'll report back how well it does in the real world.