Otaku Gadgets

Sony has recently upped the ante on their new Blu-ray enabled Vaio. The FW480J/T is a brand new incarnation of the FW351J/H – with a better processor, better graphics and generally better everything. That leaves us with just one question – why do companies have such superspy-secret-missile-code type names for their laptops? May be naming them Dorothy and Sue are passé (not to mention sexist) but having an alphanumeric soup is just too confusing, not to mention hard to remember.

Getting in to the review, the problem with this laptop is that it does not have Bluetooth and despite being able to play Blu-ray it does not have a true 1080p resolution. This is not great for full-on gaming either, even though it has a dedicated ATI Mobility Radeon graphics solution.

So why should you buy it? First of all – it is a Sony Vaio and with it comes all the good things like fantastic design and build quality. Next, the laptop is aimed at being a multimedia device and hence has solutions that make your multimedia experience richer.

Let’s start off with the screen, since this is a multimedia laptop. It has a 16.4-inch (diagonal) screen that has a native resolution of 1,600 x 900 pixels, giving it a proper 16:9 aspect ratio. Although Sony advertises this as an ‘ultra-widescreen’ laptop and it is good for watching movies on, it does not do full justice to a blu-ray movie because that is not true 1080p resolution. However, since there is an HDMI output, you can easily connect the laptop to an HD-TV and watch blu-ray movies in hi-def.

Below the screen, lie speakers that are good enough for a single user watching a movie in a quite environment. Their open face makes them sound clear and loud. But they are not capable of handling situations more demanding than that.

Below the strip that contains the speakers, lies the keyboard. The keyboard on the Vaio FW480J/T is of a good quality and well-designed. It resembles the ones found on MacBooks with its wide design and well spaced out keys. They have a muted click, a short travel and are very comfortable to use. They are also very flat, which does not cause any hindrance at all.

The touchpad is a smooth and accurate one. The buttons are flush with the surface and also have comfortable travel and muted clicks.

There are separate multimedia keys at the top of the keyboard but they are not backlit. That makes them quite hard to place under ill-lit conditions.

The laptop is minimalistic in its design and sports an elegant look. It is fully black on the inside with a rich chocolate color on the outside. The only touch of other colors is in the LED ring on its hinge that changes color to indicate the power status (charging, fully charged, etc.) and pulses when the laptop sleeps. The AC charging port is built into one side of the hinge of the FW480J/T and the power button is on the other side.

As we come to the specs, you will see that this laptop has a lot of power under the hood in the form of a 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 processor. The new Penryn core processor, represented by the ‘P’ is a goo upgrade over the older Turion processor (T6400). Whilst we think of the fantastic reasoning behind Intel’s nomenclature, let’s look at the other features.

This Vaio features an ATI Mobility Radeon 4650 with 512 megabytes of dedicated memory. While it is a great improvement over the older FW series laptop, it is certainly no gaming beast. You can expect to play games at somewhat more lenient settings and probably with anti-aliasing set to ‘off’ to get good frame rates. However, you can play games like Far Cry 2 on the FW480J/T. So while you should not be showing it off to your hardcore gamer friends, you can indulge in some casual gaming now and then with some of the less demanding mainstream games.

The laptop comes with 6 gigabytes of RAM, which is already a lot and can be upgraded to 8GB if you want. There is a nice and spacious 400GB 5400rpm hard drive on the laptop as well, although we would have been happier with a 7200rpm drive. Many of the similarly priced laptops from Asus and Dell carry a larger 500GB 7200 rpm drive, making things respond a bit faster.

As this is supposed to be a dedicated multimedia laptop, the ports too are multimedia focused. So you have an HDMI port for viewing things on a larger screen. There’s a mini-firewire port for those who still own devices that use this port, which is nearly extinct. There are hardly a few older drives and devices like camcorders around that use a mini-firewire port. There is a dual slot card reader on the FW480J/T. It supports both Sony’s proprietary Memory Sticks and SD cards. There are three USB 2.0 ports on the laptops and you will be justified if you want more. The average count for USB ports in this segment is four.

The FW480J/T comes with a 12-cell battery included. Under extreme stress, it can run up to almost 3.5 to 4 hours depending on what you are doing. For a laptop of this size and stature, that is actually a good battery life. Several testers have noted that similar laptops from Dell and Asus have shorter batter lives in comparison.

Thanks to the power efficient Penryn core and the overall design of the laptop, the power consumption of this laptop is quite low. So it is one of the more power efficient laptops out there.

The bottom line is this – if you were looking a Blu-ray laptop with multi-media features and good looks, this new Vaio would be a good bet. It can also handle the occasional gaming session. This is a fixed configuration laptop that is already available is stores and priced the same as the new 13-inch MacBook Pro at $1,199.00.