Sony Vaio TR1A Review
August 6, 2003
By Eric Grevstad
A Tiny Design Tour de Force
Japanese schoolgirls (and not a few Japanese adults of both sexes) croon, "Kawaii!" -- "How cute!" -- and whip out their wallets for the newest Hello Kitty backpack or Thunder Bunny lunchbox. Hardened IT professionals say much the same thing when they first see the Vaio PCG-TR1A.
The newest notebook from Sanrio -- sorry, from Sony Electronics -- is anything but a bulky desktop-replacement portable; it measures just 7.4 by 10.6 by 1.5 inches and weighs less than half as much as your average laptop (3.2 pounds, or 3.9 if you add the AC adapter). But it doesn't sacrifice an optical drive as many slimline or lightweight systems do -- a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive is built in, with no external module or docking base required. (If you want a floppy drive, however, it plugs into a USB port and costs $80.)
And since you're going to be watching DVD movies on the plane, the TR1A has an exceptional screen -- small (10.6 inches diagonally), but ideal for letterboxed cinema with wide-aspect-ratio 1,280 by 768 resolution, and one of the brightest and sharpest notebook displays you've ever seen. Sony calls its premier LCD technology XBrite, and it's identifiable by the screen's TV-style glossy black instead of flat gray appearance when turned off; it makes a not just noticeable but vivid, high-contrast difference in DVD or presentation viewing, although we liked only the top three of the nine brightness settings.
But wait, you say: Movie-watching is one thing, but the combination of high resolution and subnotebook size leads to eyestrain in office applications? Sony offers a clever compromise -- push a magnifying-glass button to the right of the LCD, and the display toggles between its native resolution and a slightly pixilated but quite readable 1,024 by 600, so menus and icons are easier to make out.
All right, you say, but the curse of lightweight laptops is brief battery life; who wants to watch only the first hour of Casablanca? That might be the best news of all: Though the Vaio's standard lithium-ion cell is small, it lasts longer than you'd expect -- more than twice as long as that of a larger Intel Centrino portable, the Gateway 200XL we tested last week. Sony's claim of up to seven hours is silly, but we managed just under four hours of routine work (with six- or seven-ninths brightness instead of a dim screen), or a good three hours and 10
minutes of strenuous software-installing and game-playing.
The TR1A isn't cheap at $2,200 ($2,300 with Windows XP Professional instead of Home), and its slightly downsized keyboard takes a bit of typing practice. But it's a sensational portable solution.
Just the Speed You Need
Like other Centrino systems, the Vaio combines Intel's integrated graphics and 802.11b wireless networking controllers with its Pentium M processor -- in this case, the ultra-low-voltage 900MHz Pentium M, which takes only two-thirds the power of the 1.3GHz through 1.7GHz chips we've seen in other Centrino notebooks.
Realistically, that also means two-thirds of the performance, despite the Pentium M's speed-boosting 1MB Level 2 cache -- the Sony is perfectly perky for e-mail and spreadsheet work and showed our Die Another Day DVD without a stammer, but you shouldn't expect it to blaze through image- or video-editing jobs (even if you're loony enough to do much image- or video-editing on a 10.6-inch screen).
With a BAPco SysMark 2002 benchmark score of 101 (108 in Internet Content Creation, 95 in Office Productivity) and FutureMark PCMark 2002 ratings of 2,972 (CPU), 3,230 (memory), and 336 (hard disk), the TR1A performs about like the 1.0GHz Pentium III through 1.6GHz Celeron notebooks seen at the Labs, Weather, & Sports Desk some 12 to 18 months ago -- which are still, needless to say, quite acceptable tools for everyday tasks, and a lot bigger and heavier than the diminutive new Vaio.
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