Once a renouned selection for on-the-go laptop shoppers, the 11-inch laptop has depressed on hard times of late (aside from the $999 11-inch MacBook Air ). It's not considerably as high a drop-off as we saw with the 10-inch Netbook, but you could tally the number of 11-inch laptops we've reviewed this year on a hand, and still have a couple of fingers left over.
Sony has a new 11-inch Vaio E that creates a decent box for reviving this category, with serviceable opening and a pointy design, and forthcoming in at $449 interjection to a new AMD E2-1800 processor (an Intel Core i3 chronicle would doubtlessly cost more).
The new direction toward gaunt ultrabooks has mostly done 11-inch laptops unnecessary. They still have not as big desktop footprints, but often import more and have thicker bodies than super-slim 13-inch laptops, that finish up being more utilitarian surrounding go machines for many people. But, the 13-inch and incomparable ultrabooks (or ultrabook-like systems, such as HP's new Sleekbook line ) still cost more, at least $599 and often closer to $1,000.
With opening that's acceptable, but not precisely zippy, and a body that feels a bit plasticky and clacky, I'd be more cozy with the 11-inch Sony Vaio E at $399, rsther than than $449. But for unstable Web surfing and simple productivity, it does the job. And, interjection to AMD's insistence on inclusive decent graphics hardware from the one-time ATI (now only AMD's GPU division), this network obviously does a decent work of personification games.
This 11-inch model is not the only Vaio E array laptop Sony makes. We formerly reviewed the 15-inch Vaio E15 , that has a identical look and feel (although it has an Intel Core i5 CPU). This E-series pattern has a two-tone palette, in this box a white set of keys tray and wrist rest jacket around to the bottom row and lid, contrasted against a black at the tip of the set of keys tray, the shade bezel, and the side panels.
It's a chic look that belies the system's bill price, and segment of a direction I'm saying with lower-cost laptops getting attractive makeovers, inclusive the HP Envy Sleekbook 6 and the Dell Inspiron 14z.
While this is a pretty unstable 11-inch laptop, there's a lot of contest out there in both density and weight. Apple's 11-inch MacBook Air weighs about a bruise less, and Acer's 13-inch Aspire S5 is shut to that. Both are moreover sufficient thinner. In fact, this Vaio E is as thick as Dell's high-end midsize XPS 15 .
While Sony roughly always has good-to-excellent keyboards on Vaio laptops, the set of keys in the new E array is notably pleasing, deliberation the price.
The flat-topped, island-style keys (a type Sony used long before it was popular) feel solid, with really small flex, even beneath complicated typing. The key faces are not as big than what you may be used to on a 13-inch or incomparable laptop, but Sony does a great work of creation certain critical keys, such as Tab, Shift, and Enter, are considerable enough to strike easily. The 4 directional arrow keys obtain a small squeezed, however.
My two greatest complaints are that the set of keys is not backlit -- a underline found on even budget-priced laptops now, and the multimedia manage keys, such as audio volume and mute, are relegated to Fn+F-key assignments, creation them hard to use on the fly.
The long, rectilinear hold desk pad reminds me of what you used to see on 10-inch Netbook laptops. To keep the system's on the whole size down, a longer, roughly letterbox-style hold desk pad is used. This a is not as shoal as a few I've seen, but its measure do make scrolling down long straight Web pages more difficult. That said, the matte aspect has the correct amount of grip, and two-finger scrolling was pleasingly responsive.
Sony loves to rise and add exclusive media and pity program with its laptops. Here, you obtain an app called PlayMemories, for handling photos and videos, together with a not similar app called Media Gallery, which, well, manages photos and videos (and music). There's moreover the Vaio Gate quick-launch bar, found on every new Sony laptop, that can indicate your to definite apps and settings menus. we always finish up branch it off, since by default it sits at the back a buoyant add-on at the tip corner of the shade and constantly activates itself when we put the cursor nearby the tip of a Web browser page (to type in a URL, for example).
The 11.6-inch manifestation has a local fortitude of 1,366x768 pixels. That's an arguably stale resolution, found on laptops from 11 inches all the way up to 15 inches (I've even seen it on a couple of bill 17-inch laptops), but it's most appropriate matched for this shade size. Sony is well known for glorious displays, and this a has great off-axis observation from the side, nonetheless it still has a slight straight optimal margin of view.
With a body thicker than many 12-inch laptops, the 11-inch Vaio E can fit in a few of the ports left out of slimmer systems. There's a full-size Ethernet jack, for example, that is often relegated to an outmost dongle in ultrabooks, together with a VGA video output, other space-hogging connection frequently forsaken .
This is the initial laptop we've tested with AMD's dual-core E2-1800 processor. That's a well-defined line from AMD's flagship A-series CPUs (although AMD calls them APUs, or Accelerated Processing Units, mixing CPU and GPU in a unit), that we only saw in the HP Envy Sleekbook 6.
The more modernized A6 fragment in the HP Envy was slower than, but still a in accord with tie in for, comparable Intel parts. The E2-1800 was not even in the same ballpark performancewise, and fell well at the back in our benchmark tests. Looking back over the laptops we've tested this year, only the Lenovo ThinkPAd X130e, with an AMD E-300 CPU and a Toshiba C655, with an Intel Celeron processor, had somewhat identical scores.
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