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Sony's Flash-Based Notebook Reviewed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hefty-price-for-loss-of-capability dept.

Lucas123 writes "Computerworld's Rich Ericson reviewed Sony's first all flash-based laptop, which carries a whopping $3,200 price tag. Ericson says the laptop runs incredibly fast, with an average data transfer rate of 33.6MB/sec and great battery life. But, the laptop is also limited to certain uses. While lending itself to travel, the small capacity of its hard drive doesn't make it a real competitor for a main PC workhorse. 'While there's a lot to like [about the VAIO TZ191N notebook], there's only very limited uses for which I'd recommend this system. The best features — its size and the flash drive — are also its biggest limitations.'"

9 of 229 comments (clear)

  1. Call me old fashioned... by JamesRose · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But I love this idea, I really dislike the currenty "portables" with 17" screens, its just like, not at all actually portable, I mean, I'm really surprised that the laptop industry has gone towards bigger laptops, rather than smaller (but that must be what people want right). I really like the idea of an ultra fast PC which is nice and small to use on the go, and the hard drive is PLENTY as long as you have a good sync program on your main PC and sync regularly, and lets face it, someone spending $3200 on a laptop probably will. But of course, $3200 for a "fast" laptop isnt ever a good investment, because the current progression (and the progression for quite a long time) has been too fast to warrant spending that much on what will very quickly become obselete. The main point is, this is an early adopter machine- very nice, but wont be the best by any stretch of the imaginiation.

  2. Pricey by jav1231 · · Score: 5, Funny

    So a $3200.00 limited use PC. This should be called the Sony ID-10-T PC.

  3. 32GB is good space for business by kbob88 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    32GB is really a lot of space, especially for business users. Today we don't think it's enough, because we've all loaded our computers up with games, music, and video. But for business users who only use the laptop for storing business documents, it should be more than enough space.

    My (old) laptop has 30GB of HDD, and that was plenty of room for 10+ years of business documents, plus numerous programming environments and databases. It only became limiting when I put 13GB of music on it.

    For business-oriented 'road warriors' who value speed and battery life over games and media, this is probably a good choice. Especially if they can get their company to fork over the big $$ for it.

    That said, I'd wait a year until the price comes down significantly and the space doubles or triples.

  4. Re:Space issues by heinousjay · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Real geeks use whatever they want. Geeks with no self esteem try to make cliques.

    --
    Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
  5. I've had one for a couple months now. by Pike · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Bought one (new on ebay for $2800) to replace a Toshiba that cost me $900 in 2002, and it's great. It works for me because I don't play high end video games, and is very snappy and VERY light.

    • I love that I can stick it in my little backpack and hardly feel it.
    • With wifi on I can get 6 hours of battery life pretty easily, more with it off.
    • The screen quality is the best I have ever seen.
    • You can burn bootable recovery DVDs and wipe the 9GB recovery partition. With MS Office and OpenOffice installed and a couple GB of music, I have 13GB free.
    • Pop it onto the docking station and I have access to an external HD - no need to carry ALL my photos with me everywhere I go.
    • The keyboard is a little small but surprisingly not bad. It didn't take me long to find that I prefer hitting Fn-Left/RightArrow for Home/End and Fn-Up/DownArrow for PageUp/PageDown - less moving around for my fingers.
    • I don't even know what bootup times are because it just goes into sleep mode whenever I close the lid, takes maybe five seconds to come back up. I think I've done a full reboot maybe four times since the initial "cleanout" (which is the one downside for me - you will spend about a day cleaning up all the garbage and adware that comes preinstalled).

    I do mainly writing, php programming, video/photo editing, web design, and of course email/web. You have no idea what a productivity boon it is to be able to take your laptop everywhere with you, whip it out when you want it without worrying about battery life, then just pop it onto a docking station at night to charge just like a cell phone.

  6. Re:WTF? Sony for $3k, Asus for $350? by ivan256 · · Score: 5, Informative

    You've got a great point. Toshiba wouldn't ever push restrictive DRM on consumers, own an RIAA member company, or pay a major studio to adopt their technology after it couldn't gain adoption on its own merits. They've actually got a squeaky-clean corporate reputation. Hugely ethical...

  7. Re:Hrm... by timeOday · · Score: 5, Informative
    Ok, I read your link: "With these mechanisms in place [wear leveling and bad block management], some industry analysts[1] have calculated that flash memory can be written to at full speed continuously for 51 years before exceeding its write endurance, even if such writes frequently cause the entire memory to be overwritten."

    Is that supposed to worry me?

  8. Re:Space issues by mstrebe · · Score: 5, Informative

    Space is a huge issue with SSD based laptops. This isn't the first Flash laptop from Sony--my UX390N is all flash and almost a year old. I had to take the stupid restoration partition off the flash drive in order to have enough space to install Microsoft Office.

    An 8GB restore partition on a 32GB SSD (that costed $600 at the time) means that Sony is using $200 of your money to avoid shipping $1 worth of DVD restoration media. Especially when you consider that the vast majority of that 8GB is all the crapware Sony pre-installs--none of it useful.

    --
    aka Matthew at SlashNOT/!
  9. Re:The new oblig. by Dare+nMc · · Score: 5, Informative

    does it run XP?

    http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-list.pl?mdl=VGNTZ190NB&LOC=3
    YES, I was actually surprised.
    Now get bartPE to pair down XP, with openoffice, and firefox to under 1GB, you'll have 31 GB left for data.