Sony VAIO Y
Sony’s Y series is the company’s new 13.3-inch notebook. It brings all the style you’d expect from a Sony laptop to the sub-$800 price point. This is made possible by using the CULV platform which has an affordable ultra-low voltage processor and lacks an optical drive. The combination allows for a computer that is thin, light, and easy on the wallet. We know that the CULVs bring a lot of value, but Sony’s sleeker product comes in at more expensive than something like the Gateway EC1430U or the Toshiba T135. We’ll see how Sony did with this attractive offering.
Design
Measuring 1.3 inches thick and weighing 3.8 pounds, the black VAIO Y is made for travel. It’s also made to last. Sony decked out the top and bottom of the chassis in magnesium, giving the notebook a nice rigidity; twisting the machine in our hands with the lid closed resulted in zero flex. The competing ASUS UL30A has a light silver brushed aluminum lid, but the deck is plastic. The HP Pavilion dm3 has aluminum on both the lid and deck, which gives it more of a consumer feel. Some may feel the VAIO Y looks too much the part of a business machine, but we like its fit and finish. Other elegant details on the VAIO Y include a textured grid pattern on the deck, which has a nice feel. Like other Sony notebooks, this one sports circular hinges; the right side houses the power button, and the left has the power jack. Above the keyboard is a speaker strip and two buttons: VAIO and Assist. The VAIO button launches VAIO Media Gallery software, while the Assist button pulls up VAIO Care for quick access to support and troubleshooting options.
Keyboard and Touchpad
The VAIO Y has a comfortable Chiclet-style keyboard that is easy to type on for long periods of time. Compared to the Vaio Z the spacing is a bit different, putting dedicated Page Up/Down and Home/End keys on the right side of the keyboard, instead of including them as secondary functions over the direction keys. This caused some shrinking of the right shift button and left control button as well as slightly tighter spacing. The keyboard also lacks one of the luxurious backlit keys seen on the VAIO Z, but that was expected given the much lower starting price. Keyboard support is excellent with no noticeable keyboard flex under strong typing pressure. Key responsiveness is great as well as very quiet key actions that don’t emit much noise when fully pressed.
The touchpad on the VAIO Y is a Synaptics model that is very responsive and has no discernible lag. The touchpad includes some multitouch features, including two-finger scroll which the Z actually skipped in favor of the chiral-scrolling motion. Refresh rates were excellent, preventing any “trails” from the cursor drawing fast circles on the screen. The touchpad settings out of the box were near perfect, with no tweaks needed during the review. I also found the touchpad buttons to be easy to trigger with the edge of your thumb and had shallow feedback when fully pressed. Overall the touchpad was very good and one of the nicer models seen on a thin and light notebook.
Ports and Webcam
There are few surprises when it comes to the port selection on the VAIO Y. Like most ULV notebooks, this one lacks a DVD drive, so looks elsewhere if that’s and important feature to you. The left side houses the power jack, VGA port, HDMI, one USB 2.0, a FireWire port, and headphone and microphone jacks. The Ethernet ports, two more USB 2.0 ports, and an ExpressCard/34 slot line the right side. Up front you’ll find separate Memory Stick and SD Card slots.
Display
The Sony VAIO Y comes standard with a 13.3-inch WXGA panel with no upgrade options for higher resolutions. Compared to other CULV-based notebooks the screen rates above average with good color and contrast. I have to admit that this screen was a step down from the one seen on the VAIO Z, which had a higher color saturation and deeper black levels (at nearly triple the cost!). For users looking to enjoy a movie on the road, enjoy a YouTube clip during class or type a term paper during a study session the screen is perfect. Backlight levels were good for bright indoor viewing conditions, with the surface measuring 196nit at full brightness. Viewing angles were good, although colors did seem to have a narrow sweet spot of roughly 10-15 degrees before colors started to shift or invert vertically. Horizontal viewing angles were much better, spanning over 60 degrees from the side.
Battery
Much like the ThinkPad Edge 13″, the VAIO Y doesn’t live up to the lofty claims by Sony in terms of battery life; it’s not even close. Sony claims that you can get up to 8 hours of life from a single standard battery. We got just over 3. Of course, our test represents expected life while you’re actually working, but even if we would’ve left the machine idle for long stretches, we can’t imagine that 3 hours ever stretching to 8. It may get 4 or 5 hours if you play your cards right, but 8 seems overly optimistic. Overall, 3 hours of life while working isn’t bad for a standard cell in a CULV machine, but Sony’s claims make it more difficult accept the 3 hours. We honestly expected to get somewhere close to 8 hours, and as you can see, we were let down in a big way.
Performance
Like many other ultraportables in this price range, the VAIO Y features Intel’s 1.3-GHz Core 2 Duo SU7300 processor. This dual-core CPU, along with 4GB of RAM combined to offer snappy performance. The system scored 2,906 in PCMark Vantage; that showing is above the ultraportable category average (2,739), much better than the ASUS UL30A (2,442), and slightly higher than the HP Pavilion dm3 (2,874). The VAIO Y also beats the Intel version of the Toshiba Satellite T135 (2,701). Anecdotally, the VAIO Y proved to be a good performer; we noticed only a bit of lag when we tried to zoom in on our Manhattan office while we had Pandora streaming in the background, and most applications opened quickly.
