A while ago I blogged about my dream laptop. Well, recently I purchased a Sony Z.
This laptop is really nice. It has a nice fast 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo 2 on the new Montevina chipset. It comes with 3 GB of very fast (and expensive) DDR3 RAM. It has dual video card, which allows me to use the integrated Intel graphics to save battery while switching to nVidia 9300M for gaming, all without needing to reboot. It also has HDMI out at 1080p resolution as well as the old VGA port. The colors of the screen is something to behold with 100% saturation. It comes with a WebCam wth Mic built-in and a Fingerprint scanner which is surprisingly useful. Firewire connection. 3.3 lbs. 3-6 hours of battery life. Made in Japan.
However, there are a few problems that’s making me second guess whether I should keep this. The biggest issue is the keyboard. It’s got the MacBook style keyboard with a bigger pitch, but somehow I find myself keep missing keys as I type. I can type as fast as 100 wpm, but even when I cruise at a slow pace, sometimes i find that either my fingers are missing some keys or that when I hit a certain key nothing appears. Even as I type this blog, I find that I need to go back and correct more things that I typically do, which is highly annoying.
Then there’s the issue of the nVidia graphics card, which may have a defective soldering issue. This effectively makes my laptop a timebomb because at any time, the video card can fail. Now when it fails, I can always switch to the integrated graphics, but then why pay so much for a Z?
I also heard about the battery drain problem where the battey drains even if the laptop is shut down. I decided to try it last night and started with the battery at 49%. After shutting down completely last night and rebooting it this morning, the battery lost 14%. Now granted booting up takes some battery power (I should have plugged in the AC), but there obviously is a battery drain issue when the laptp is completely off.
Then there are a few minor things, such as the screen being 13.1 instead of 13.3 like my old S360. There’s a built-in SD card reader, but it’s completely useless for me. I have an 8 GB SDHC card, and last night I tried to download some videos I took off it last night and it estimated over 20 minutes! With my SDHC SanDisk reader, it estimated 5 minutes. Guess which one I’ll be using. The WebCam is only VGA resolution. There’s the Sprint WWAN which I have no intention of ever using but nevertheless paid for. The BIOS is a bare bones BIOS that doesn’t even have the option to turn on hardware virtualization from the Intel CPU! Lastly, for some reason there are some connectivity problems when I use this laptop with my work’s network, and even after calling helpdesk, they couldn’t resolve the issue.
The thing is, I’m not sure there are better alternatives, and I really want to have my own laptop instead of hogging Karen’s MacBook and making her go to the iPhone. Decisions, decisions.