Okay, I’ve been agonizing for a couple of months over what new laptop to get. My Sony TX has served me well, but it’s getting a little long in the tooth. It maxed out at one and half GB of RAM (which was a lot back when I bought it) and more annoying, it only has built-in 802.11b/g. Our wireless networks are 802.11n now, and I really like that extra speed, so I got a PCMCIA (PC card) n adapter but it sticks way out on the side, looks silly and ruins the compactness of the little laptop. So I decided for the new year, I’d get myself a new one. The problem: which one?
My faithful little Sony TX, which I bought with Vista installed a few days after its release and on which I installed Windows 7 last year

The TX beside its predecessor, my Sony T that I bought about five years ago, and which still runs XP fine today, although it won’t handle Aero

NETBOOK OR NOTEBOOK?

First question I had to answer: did I want a netbook or a full fledged notebook? Price wasn’t a big concern, but size/weight was. I have been very happy with the Sony, which weighs 2.7 lbs. and has an 11 inch screen. My particular use for a laptop is usually at conferences, where I’m carrying it around from session to session all day, so I want as little weight and bulk as possible. Another top consideration is battery life. It needs to last all day at those conferences, without recharging. I could get close to 7 hours with the Sony TX, with a little tweaking of the power settings.

Now, when it comes to my desktop system, I want the fastest computer possible. I don’t care if it’s three feet tall and weighs half a ton. My old XPS certainly seemed that size, but that was fine. The new desktop is a little more compact, but it’s a screaming Nehalem with 12 GB of RAM. They have Nehalem laptops on the market now, but the ones I checked out got about 2 hours of battery time on a good day. They’re big guys, too. Nope, that won’t work. And if I need something powerful on the road, I have a 17 inch Dell that I can set up in the hotel room. The Sony replacement is primarily for taking notes, checking email, surfing the web, writing and reading Word docs, maybe viewing some photos or watching a recorded TV program on the plane.

Sounds like a netbook, doesn’t it? And with a good Atom processor, you can get some incredible battery run times. But I sort of kind of wanted a tablet. After all, Apple has everyone in a frenzy about tablets now.

TABLET OR NOT?

I had one of the early tablets, back in 2002 or 2003. I like the concept – especially for drawing diagrams or taking handwritten notes in an environment where you want to keep the computer low profile. In some meetings, it’s just too disruptive to sit there clacking at the keyboard, but a tablet is no more intrusive than a pen and legal pad.

That first tablet of mine was expensive (all tablets were expensive back then), around $1800. It was also heavy by today’s standards, around 6 lbs. But they’ve come down in price and weight since then. I knew I didn’t want a slate; as I said in my blog post where I shared my first impressions of the iPad, I want and need the option to touch type on a physical keyboard. If I were to get a tablet, it would have to be a convertible.

I looked at several of the new tablets. The HP and Dell models were nice but too big and heavy. The only currently available one that impressed me was the Touch Note, made by Gigabyte. The size is right – 10.1 inches. The specs are that of a netbook, but a higher end one: 1.66 GHz N280, 2 GB of RAM, 1366x768 touch screen, 250 GB hard drive. It runs Windows 7 Home Premium (not Starter) and has a 6 cell battery that will last around 6 hours on a charge. At $749, it costs far more than many of the netbooks on the market but far less than the Sony TX, for which I paid $2200.

Another “would’ve been a contender” was the Lenovo Ideapad s-130t. I saw the pictures of it from CES, and it looked pretty nice. Unfortunately, it’s not available to buy yet. I also really liked the looks of the Acer 1420p. This was the tablet that Microsoft gave away to all the attendees at the 2009 PDC. I loved that it would support up to 8 GB of RAM and liked the 8 hour battery life, but to do all that, it had to be a bit heavier than I wanted – almost 4 lbs. Still, I would have strongly considered it except that like the Lenovo, it’s not available yet. I also have no idea what it’s going to cost.

I could’ve just decided to wait and see what the market brings – but the market is always going to bring something better eventually so if you get stuck in that “wait ‘til something better and cheaper comes along” mentality, you’ll never buy. And I really was wanting to get a new device before the next conference I’m scheduled to attend: the MVP Summit in February. That limited my choices to those that are on sale now.

SMITTEN BY ANOTHER PRETTY FACE

As I looked at all of my options, I kept feeling myself drawn back to what seemed like the most impractical choice of all: the Sony X. It’s essentially a really expensive netbook – but oh, was it ever pretty. When it comes to portable computers, I am a sucker for slim. At one point, I even considered buying a Macbook Air and wiping out OS X and installing Windows 7 on it. That’s how smitten I am by a razor-thin computer. But the Air starts at $1499 and it only has one USB port and no flash memory card slot. And despite it’s thinness, it weighs 3 lbs., which is more than the TX. Oh, and if you want the model that has a 128 GB solid state drive, you pay $1800 (the $1500 model has a 120 GB SATA drive).

The Sony X is even thinner than the Air (1/2 inch, the same as the new Apple iPad) and it weighs an incredible 1.6 lbs. with the standard battery. It’s made of carbon fiber, so that even though it looks fragile, it feels strong. It has two USB ports, an SD card slot and a memory stick slot, a standard VGA out port (you have to buy an adapter to connect the Air to a VGA monitor) and an Ethernet jack (the Air apparently relies on wireless; there is no mention of an Ethernet adapter on its tech specs web site). And you get the same 2 GB of RAM, a 128 GB SSD, GPS and built-in Verizon 3G card, all for hundreds of dollars less. Even better, I wouldn’t be giving my money to Apple.

  
The Sony X: a laptop can never be too rich or too thin

Granted, the Air has a Core 2 Duo processor while the X has an Atom. But it’s a 2 GHz Atom, and when I tried the little machine out at the Sony Store, it was surprisingly responsive. And the downside of that Core 2 processor is that the Air, according to PC World, gets only about 2 and a half hours of battery life. That was a deal breaker, right there.

The Sony X, on the other hand, comes with an extended battery that adds only a few ounces to its weight, bringing it up to 2.2 lbs. – still substantially lighter than Air and still lighter than my TX – and provides an amazing 12 hours of battery life. Wow. That energizer bunny just keeps on going. And then there is that gorgeous Sony display.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS

The practical side of me said to get the Touch Note. It cost hundreds less than the Sony and it’s a tablet. It has all the touch screen coolness. It isn’t as thin and light, but it’s certainly no heavyweight. It got outstanding reviews on Amazon. I was almost ready to order it. It made sense to save money and compromise a little on portability.

But then I would think about the X, about how it felt in my hand. It was like holding a sheet of paper. It was so thin that turned sideways, it was barely there. It was so light that I felt as if I were carrying nothing at all. And it was so pretty. Prettier than the Air, in my opinion. Another plus was that I could try it out at the Sony Store, whereas the Touch Note wasn’t available locally, as far as I could find. I went to the Sony Store to try it out one more time. There was no denying it. I was in love.

I had waited too long to get the blingy gold model (they’re all sold out, both at my local Sony Store and on the Sony web site), but the black one, with its carbon fiber finish and classy gold logo, has the look of a Stealth fighter. And if you face it edge-on, it almost disappears like a Stealth. It might not be practical, but I wanted it. Badly.

And I got it. Someday, I want a tablet – but I’ll wait until they make a tablet that I can really love. A tablet that’s as light and thin as I want it to be. A tablet that will let me work all day and into the evening on a single battery charge.  Maybe two years from now, when the Sony starts to get old, such a creature will exist. Maybe Sony will even make one themselves. Meanwhile, I’m pretty happy with what I got.

 
My little X, customized, upgraded, loaded up and ready to rock and roll

THE BOTTOM LINE

I’ve been using Sony laptops for a long time now. They always cost more, but the quality has been superb. I went laptop shopping with my cousin’s daughter not long ago, and she was agonizing over whether to buy the one that seemed like the best deal on paper, or the one that captured her eye in the beginning and kept her coming back to it. In the end, she went with her heart instead of her head – and she says she’s glad she did. I’m glad I did, too.

 
Note the credit card and camera lens cap sitting beside it, to give you an idea of how small it is. Also notice how tiny the power brick is – yes, that’s it at the top of the second photo.

In the next week or so, I’ll do a full review of it here. I’ve already upgraded the Windows 7 Home Premium OS that came with it to Ultimate, gotten rid of all the “crapware” (trial versions of Office 2007 and Quickbooks, Microsoft Works, Norton, etc.), customized my desktop and installed Office 2010. It’s running like a champ, and it’s the sexiest laptop on my block, by far.

deb@shinder.net   www.debshinder.com