Sony Vaio E Review

The Sony Vaio E is among the newest line of laptops from Sony which sports the newer Intel Core i5 processors and came in a variety of colors.

The review unit that we got was this marine-blue (metallic teal, they say) one with a clear-coat layer on top of subtle patterns starting from the lid all the way to the palm rest.

This 14-inch model of the Vaio E is relatively large and heavy — not meant to be carried around a lot but really intended to be mostly on the desk. The Vaio logo somewhats floats and casts a small shadow on the lid.

There are a plethora of ports and slots peppered around the sides of the unit — 3 USB 2.0, LAN, HDMI, eSATA, VGA, SD card and HG Duo slots. Even the WiFi has its own physical switch while the DVD drive is placed on the right side of the unit.

The full-sized keyboard features chiclet-type keys, typical of a Vaio laptop, and spaced considerably apart from each other. The recessed trackpad is fairly-sized and has a textured surface (more like pimpled) in contrast with the smooth palm rest while the left and right click buttons are separated.

The 14-inch glossy display is bright and crisp with 8 levels of brightness you can set to control screen contrast and power consumption. However, the glossy display is also prone to glare in the outdoors or against bright light sources.

The speakers are lined up across the entire length of the laptop just above the keyboard. The speaker volume is somewhere between mid to high and although there’s a noticeable lack of bass on the system, it’s very usable when watching movies.

The Vaio E is powered by an Intel Core i5 520M processor (2 cores, 4 threads) running at a base clock speed of 2.4GHz but can go up to 2.93GHz via Turbo Boost.

Graphics is provided by an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 with 1GB GDDR3 which is a mid-class DirectX11 GPU that is capable of running graphics-intensive games. Add to that a 4GB DDR3 RAM and you have a pretty decent all-around workhorse for a laptop (see complete specs here).

Windows Experience Index gives it a base score of 5.7 with the CPU getting a nice high sub-score of 6.7. Battery life suffers due to the discreet graphics card and the powerful CPU — we only get just over 2 hours on a single full charge. BatteryBar gives it about 2.5 hours with the 6-cell 5600mAh Li-Ion battery. If Sony added a switchable graphics feature using at least an Intel HD, it would have helped in power-saving mode.

The unit also comes with an Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6200 AGN so it is capable of doing Intel Wireless Display.

The Sony Vaio E comes pre-installed with a 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium and retails for Php76,999USD 1,312INR 111,233EUR 1,250CNY 9,556 which puts it the the top of the heap (in terms of price point) among Core i5 laptops in the market.