Sony TZ Laptop Series Review

Sony has been known to come out with the best and sleekest devices in recent years and the Sony TZ series is not an exception.

DESIGN:
The design of the TZ series is pretty classy. The keys are not your average notebook and the plating between the keys prevents crumbs from dropping between them and causing problems. The finish of the notebook is clean and so is the overall design.
The laptop is among the ultra portable division. With an 11.1 inch screen that is apparent along with a weight between 2.7 and 3.3 pounds depending on the model.

SOFTWARE:
Genuine Vista Business is standard on this notebook with the option to downgrade to XP Professional. Although there have been very bad reviews with Vista most of them center on upgrading older PC’s. For that reason it is pretty safe to stick with the Vista Business as it carries some notable upgrades to the old XP system.

PERFORMANCE:
Since this is the ultra mobile division of the laptop market a lot of the features that regular notebooks carry are not standard in this division. Such things as an optical drive are still optional on many ultra portable notebooks but thankfully that is standard on the Sony TZ series.

Performance is pretty sluggish though and all the extra software that Sony is notorious for stuffing under the hood of its notebooks are all here which drastically reduces performance. 1GB RAM is standard on the system with the option to double that. The hard drive is 64GB which is the average for this segment of the notebook market.

Although the system does come with an Intel Core Duo 2 processor the gigahertz is only 1.33 and the system cache is only 2MB. This means that multimedia is probably not the best choice for this notebook. You can get by with video playback and picture viewing but video editing photo editing (on programs such as Paintshop Pro or Photoshop) is definitely going to cause the system to lag.
The included Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are great. It also includes EV-DO through Sprint’s super high-speed network which has proven to be the fastest in the industry.

Battery performance is exceptional for the ultra notebook division and is even comparable to regular notebooks. Doing regular web surfing you can expect to get between 5-6 hours of battery life. Of course multimedia such as video chat (notebook comes with a built in web cam), photo viewing and video playback will greatly reduce the battery performance.

CONCLUSION:
The only question is if your $1,600 to 3,300 could be better spent. Unfortunately the answer is yes. Although it’s going to be hard to find another ultra portable notebook with the style of the TZ series it’s quite easy to find other notebooks that trump it in specs. The ultra portable Toshiba Protégé series is one such alternative.

The bottom line: The TZ series has some impressive specs but the underperformance chipset and crappy bundled software makes this a little less than a sweet deal.