Sony VAIO Z Series (2011) review

The VAIO Z Series was born of Sony’s desire to build the ultimate notebook. Feather-light yet immensely powerful, it fused ultraportable dimensions to desktop performance and made precious few compromises along the way. Now, Sony’s all-new VAIO Z has arrived, and it’s ready to rewrite the ultraportable rules once again.

Physically, the VAIO Z bears little resemblance to its former self. Sharp, boxy lines are formed from slices of carbon fibre, to create a chassis which measures a mere 17mm thick. It looks positively delicate, and its 1.15kg weight means it feels just as barely-there in the hand. There certainly isn’t the unflinching tautness of the Apple Macbook Air, and the obvious seams and slight give in the carbon sheets don’t exude the tough, go-anywhere air of Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1.

Achieving such slenderness has required more than just bold aesthetic changes, however. Sony has also done away with two of the VAIO Z’s most notable features, namely the internal optical drive and dedicated graphics.

This is where the novel Power Media Dock steps in. Resembling a simple external optical drive, it crams in an AMD Radeon HD 6650 graphics chipset, and acts as a docking station too. Look to the rear and there’s one USB 2 port, one USB 3 port, a Gigabit Ethernet socket plus D-SUB and HDMI video outputs. Unhook a flap on the dock’s top edge, and you’ll find another USB 2 port for quick attachment of a USB flash drive or similar.

It’s an elegant solution. A power supply feeds the Power Media Dock from the mains, but a single connector provides both a data and a power connection to the laptop itself. Sony’s proprietary implementation of Intel’s Light Peak technology (the very same used in the ThunderBolt ports on Apple’s recent MacBook Pro) then jets all the graphical, USB and network data via the VAIO Z’s single USB 3 port. Plug it in, and the laptop’s screen flickers off and on as the AMD chipset takes over from the integrated GPU.