As far as the eye can see, the Sony VAIO X is exactly the kind of ultra-portable laptop you’d want to take home just to ogle at the whole day. It’s really that pretty. As with other VAIO series laptops, however, its looks come with a price, a rather large one. VAIO laptops come at a premium, and the VAIO X isn’t one to differ. The VPCX113KG/B hovers at P70,000 while the VPCX117LG/B is priced at P90,000.
Is there gold hidden somewhere in there? The Sony VAIO X is sleek, slim and sexy. For a laptop, it is paper thin, with a thickness of just 13.9 millimeters. It’s like the Macbook Air, only it’s not a Mac. Along with its slim profile, the VAIO X’s weight of just around 700 grams makes it such a breeze to carry around.
If you’re worried with accidental bumps and hits, Sony promises that its carbon fibre housing protects the innards like a knightly shield. Holding it in our hands, the laptop does feel like it’s constructed with premium materials and excellent craftsmanship. We can say the same about the 11.1 1366 x 768 pixel LCD screen—it’s beautiful and definitely doesn’t have the feel of a cheap China knock-off. Battery life isn’t a problem too, with the entry level model averaging about 3 hours and the higher priced one going for 6.5 hours.
The specs are nothing that you won’t be able to find in other ultra-portables. The lower priced VPCX113KG/B features an Intel Atom Z540 1.86 GHz processor, 2GB of DDR2 RAM, Intel GMA 500, 64 GB of SSD memory and WiFi 802.11 b/g/draft N.The VPCX117LG/B has a faster Intel Atom Z550 2.0GHz processor and 128GB of SSD memory.
Both laptops are equipped with Microsoft’s Windows 7 OS, with the Home Premium version running on the VPCX113KG/B and the Professional version running on VPCX117LG/B. These are pretty solid specs for an ultra portable, and the inclusion of Windows 7 will hopefully make us forget how painful Vista was. But as we’ve been saying the whole time, other competing ultra portables have similar specs, and a much, much lower price.
The bottom line here is, the VAIO X wants more to do with your image and your lifestyle than to offer the most attractive price-per-performance ratings. It is beautiful, and offers solid performance, but there’s a big price to be paid if you want its company.
With the iPhone written down permanently in the wish lists of many gadget freaks, we wonder a little why Apple keeps on coming out with new versions of the iPod Nano.
Who needs an MP3 player when you can get an all-in-one device that lets you call, listen to music, watch videos, and play beer-pouring games? But hey who are we to question Apple? What we’ll try to figure out here is if this 8,000 to 10,000-peso gadget is really worth it. Like many of Apple’s products, the iPod Nano is a supermodel amongst MP3 players. Pardon the superlative, but you know the Nano has been sexy ever since it was released. It remains as such up to now.
This Nano retains its ultra-sleek anodized aluminum exterior, while the size of its LCD screen has been increased by 0.2 of an inch. Unless you were begging to ruin your eyes, we still wouldn’t recommend watching a full-length movie on it. To make way for the slightly larger screen, the click wheel has been resized down, which isn’t really an issue for most of us who don’t have alien, sausage fingers.
Once you recalibrate your digits to navigate the smaller click wheel, you’ll find out that this Nano actually has new features. The most amazing of which has got to be its trailblazing FM Radio functionality. Just kidding. No, it does has the functionality, but it's not the greatest.
The greatest addition has got to be the 5th-gen iPod Nano’s video recorder. At the start, using this function might be a little jarring, since the camera placement— on the lower left side of the back panel—a tad odd. You’ll still have to turn the iPod to one side (as opposed to the upright recording most camera phones give you) to capture video.
By your 9th or 10th video though, you’ll be quite accustomed to it, along with the Nano’s cool video filters. We really find it amazing that the Nano’s tiny camera can take great-looking shots.
In the end, the iPod Nano is an impressively-designed, easy-to-use MP3 player, as it has been since it was introduced. The new tricks it has under its sleeve should only make it more desirable. But we really can’t recommend it to you wholeheartedly, primarily because at its price, we’d rather shell out a little more for a smartphone that can do everything a Nano can do, and then some.
