Sony Vaio Z delivers high-end components into slender form

Some of us have grown up to love Sony Vaio’s. In my mind they are the next best thing to a MacBook – although the difference between them is huge. My point however is that if you have the money to buy a Mac but want a Windows system, a Sony Vaio is the next best thing in terms of design and performance.

Sony have recently announced the Vaio Z which packs a 13.3″ display with a pretty good 1,600*900 resolution. The Vaio Z is just 16.7mm thick and thank to some carbon fibre construction weighs just under 1.2 Kg. Inside you will find the basic specification of a 2.3 GHz i5 2410 CPU and 4GB of DDR3 RAM as well as a 128 GB SSD. The Vaio Z battery life has been quoted at 7 hours although doubling to 14-hours with the larger battery.

The Vaio Z has an optional Power Media Dock connected by ‘Light Peak’ (equivalent of Thunderbolt) which boosts the Vaio Z’s internal graphics with a 1GB AMD Radeon HD 6650M card, as well as an addition of up to a Blu-ray Writer and a few extra USB ports. The PMD also supports 3D output via HDMI.

At this point in time you are probably starting to wonder about prices. Well, with the carbon fibre and ssds built in as standard, prices do start at a staggering £1,434 and this doesn’t include the dock. There are also many optional extra, or for instance you could upgrade the display, double the RAM, add HSDPA connectivity and much much more. Of course, you could also upgrade the CPU to a 2.7 GHZ i7 2620M and if you really do have lots of money then you could upgrade to a 512GB SSD, but we won’t tell you how much that costs as we don’t want you to faint while reading this.

The Power Media Dock while it is an excellent idea is going to cost a minimum of £350 but it does convert a laptop into a desktop. Although you could buy a desktop for that price.

If you have lots of money, then the Vaio Z is on sale now at the Sony Store and will hit retailers shortly. While it is expensive it is a beautiful looking piece of kit that really does pack in some fantastic features and options.