The Sony Vaio X is sure to turn heads, with its carbon fiber body weighing in at 1.6 pounds. At only 0.55-inches thick, the new Vaio X is a little bit thinner than the recently announced Dell Latitude Z, and a lot lighter than most ultra-slim notebooks. You will have to make some trade offs for the Vaio X's sleek chassis, though, starting with its puny 11.1-inch LED backlit screen with 1366 x 768 resolution. By comparison, the MacBook Air has a 13.3-inch diagonal screen and the Dell Latitude Z sports a whopping 16-inch display.For this price, you get a specification that is not much better than a typical netbook, which makes the Vaio X Series a stylish but costly option for those needing a highly portable system to carry with them when travelling. However, we have concerns about whether the X Series is sturdy enough to survive everyday use on the road. The system's screen bends alarmingly and even the chassis can be ice cream maker factory deformed noticeably by exerting only modest pressure.With the exception of an undersized right Shift key, the keys were decently spaced and sized, but overall, it felt slightly cramped. Also, as a result of the netbooks thinness, theres less travel to the keys than on other systems, so we ended up hitting them harder than were accustomed to.

The VAIO Xs touchpad was a decently sized 2.1 x 1.6 inches, and offered little friction. However, like the keyboard, it could have been a smidgen larger, especially considering its capable of recognizing multitouch gestures, such as pinch and zoom. Two mouse buttons below are also small but responsive.First hardware impressions weren't fantastic. With all Aero's fripperies switched on, the X-Series felt sluggish, and even dragging windows around the desktop proved a chore. Once we optimised Windows for best performance, though, things improved markedly. Without Aero's overhead, menus snapped to attention, there was no lag and it became perfectly usable. It just looked a little bit like Windows 98. We were also impressed once inside a program. Despite using testing formulae in Excel, the X-Series never felt slow, and likewise in Outlook responding to emails was effortless. Another point in favour of the Atom is a lack of fan noise: during an average working day, we didn't hear a single drone. It was only when we pushed this laptop to its maximum in our benchmarks that the fan came on (though note that it's loud).Being a netbook (and not an Ion-powered one at that), the VAIO X doesnt perform graphically demanding chores all that well. Its 3DMark03 score of 364 was nearly 290 points shy of the category average (3DMark06 would not run on the system).

Still, a 720p MPEG-4 movie trailer (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) played smoothly at full screen, even when output via VGA to a 32-inch Samsung HDTV (of course, the max output resolution was only 1366 x 768).While taking the sightseeing tour in Google Earth, we were only able to average 5 frames per second with the app at full screen, and 3D buildings, such as those seen at Googleplex, took nearly half a minute to load. By comparison, the HP Mini 311, which has a discrete Nvidia Ion LE graphics chip, averaged 24 fps on the same test.Sony's claim that the VAIO X battery lasts "all day and well into the night and will set the new standard for battery stamina," as proclaimed at its IFA unveil back in September in Berlin. A bold claim that Laptop Magazine has now put to the test. The result? Well, first of all, if you're hoping to get anything close to the hype then you'll have to opt for the extended battery -- the standard 4-cell battery is only rated for about 3 hours of power. Fortunately, the extended battery bolt-on (literally, it attaches to the bottom with two screws) is included in the X-series price -- smart move Sony. According to Laptop's tests, the VAIO X merrily pumped away for nearly 10 hours using WiFi (GPS and 3G turned off) thereby easily laying to waste most 6-hour, 6-cell netbooks, impressive.

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