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Home » Gadget Reviews » Sony Vaio Y Review

Sony Vaio Y Review

Sony’s candidate in the thin and light category is the Vaio Y. Introduced in the Philippines last February, the Sony Vaio Y is a 13.3″ notebook powered by an Intel 1.3GHz CULV.

The is painted matte silver all-over with a black base (the one is actually an engineering unit) and a somewhat textured palm rest. The body is, as expected, thin and light with added design accents pretty common to most high-end Vaio laptops.

There are a couple of buttons Sony added on top of the full qwerty keyboard — an Assist button for out-of-the-box customer support and a Vaio button that triggers Transfer Support (for when you want to migrate your content/documents from one Vaio laptop to another).

The full-sized keyboard features chiclet-type keys that are very well spaced and comfortable to use. The multi-touch trackpad,, slightly shifted to the left, is wide and a bit textured with the left and right clickers separated at the middle.

The 13.3″ screen is a good 1366×768 pixel resolution and glossy which makes the display bright and crisp but is prone to glare when used outdoors or against bright light sources. What’s a bit annoying is the Vaio Gate (a shortcut bar that docks on top of the screen) that messes up a portion of the screen and blocks off the tabs when using the browser of full screen. Fortunately, you can either hide that or completely turn that off on start-up.

As for performance, we got a pretty nice results from the Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 @ 1.3GHz and the 2GB DDR3 RAM (upgradeable to 8GB DDR3 RAM). Windows Experience Index gives it a base score of 3.4 (from the Intel GMA 4500MHD) while the CPU gets a nice 4.1 sub-score. Video playback on YouTube HD is smooth at 720p but a little choppy on 1080p.

Complete benchmarks and CPU/GPU screenshots are posted in the PC Labs. The numbers are as expected of a CULV system and within range of other SU7300 we’ve tested before.

The complete specs are on the higher end of the spectrum as well, starting with WiFi 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.1 connectivity. Storage is provided by a 320GB Toshiba SATA HDD. Aside from 3 USB 2.0 ports, its got an HDMI port, an ExpressCard slot, and SD Card/Memory Stick reader.

The 6-cell battery is rated at 5,000mAh or 54Wh (BatteryBar shows 57,240mWh @ 10.8V). I get an average 5 to 6 hours on balanced settings and BatteryBar gives it a nice rating of just under 6 hours (close to the promised 8 hours by Sony).

That’s already a good balance between performance and battery life.

As expected of any Sony line of laptops, the Sony Vaio Y comes with a premium price of Php54,999USD 937INR 79,452EUR 893CNY 6,825. It’s probably the only thin-and-light CULV model around that’s priced above the 50k range. Now that’s what it means when they say you’re paying for the Sony brand.

Abe Olandres
Abe Olandres
Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.
  1. first! :)

  2. nice. gaano kabigat?

  3. @jd – 3.9lbs

  4. Ok naman ang price ah. Most C2D laptops are about that range, maybe 5k less. And this VAIO has DDR3. And Sony has the best laptop screens in the market. Screens are the most expensive part of a notebook computer.

  5. master, how bout the camera? is acer’s still the best in the market?

    -dale

  6. sir yuga,, alin po mas maganda?? eto poh o ung MacBook?? tnx,,poh!

  7. steep price, vat and sony tax included!

  8. Awesome.But still can’t par my old desktop.
    How about some Sony VAIO P series next? :D

  9. you know you should stop accepting for review units that you have to return and demand promotional units that you can give away after testing. You’re being taken advantage of :) and they sure better not be paying to do reviews :)

  10. sometimes we tend to forget that the prices for the thin and lights are bordering full laptop territory; even exceeds it.

    Saw this one last easter Sunday, It’s a nice entry for the category. build is definitely Sony.

  11. I always dreamed of owning a Sony Vaio laptop, but it’s quite expensive.Just like other sony products…Ahh, that’s the price of being a quality brand.

  12. @Gams – Mahal na pagdating dito satin. If you have a relative in the US, and you have cash then that’s a better option. :)

  13. @gamerumble

    True. Here in the Philippines, parang double yung Sony tax haha

  14. Not only are you paying for the Sony brand, but you brand but you are also going to pay for the huge customs taxes. Price in USA = $799 (around P35,600).

  15. Sorry, typo there.

    “Not only are you paying for the Sony brand, but you are also paying for the huge customs taxes here. Price at Sony Style website = USD799 (approx. Php35,600).”

  16. sony bulok ang service. I bought a sony vaio about a year may dead pixel and lcd but did not replace it even though 1 week lang sa akin. ayaw palitan ang unit. They referred me to sony service sa may Ermita. pagbalik same pa din nandun pa din ang dead pixel, sana man lang they replace the LCD. Don’t buy their vaio laptops ang mahal na MADE in CHINA lang pala. Later I sold mine and bought a Fujitsu. Damn, sana nung umpisa Fujitsu na kinuha ko. Tama lang ang price and made in Japan pa.

  17. When i bought my Dell vostro earlier this year, it had a dead pixel and i returned the laptop the following day. Once they confirmed the defect, they issued a replacement right there and then. I was pleased with the service considering that it is not Dell’s service center but Silicon Valley. I thought i’d consider vaio for my next purchase but thanks to nob’s tip i eliminated it with my options.

  18. san po pwedeng bilhin at magkano po ang bayad at presyo

  19. Talaga panget ang service nila? Naku, ang Macbook ba maganda ang service?

  20. With this price I was able to get an F series in Hong Kong. Core i5, 4GB RAM exp to 8GB, 500 HDD. may 3 years warranty pa! W/ no warranty? 49k lang. Gosh, I hate customs taxes!

  21. i so love my sony vaio Y series!

  22. sony vaio is not a good laptop when it comes to sounds the first thing you must now if you are planning to buy best laptop is the quality of the unit and the software support and then go for the specification my vaio speaker now is broken after 2 months lang so I bought a new HP Pavilion dv4-2161nr 2010 model laptop this is so fast and win 7 os core i7 500 ang hdd ko then with Intel Graphics Media Accelerator HD Graphics.. you will love it the HP. now 6 moths na cya and no problem

    The Intel Graphics Media Accelerator HD Graphics, Intel HD Graphics, or GMA HD (or GMA5700MHD) is an onboard / shared memory graphics card for laptops that is bundled in the package of the new Arrandale dual core CPUs (upcoming in Q1 2010). Depending on the CPU model, the GMA HD is clocked between 166 and 500 MHz (with Turbo Boost max. 500-766 MHz). Compared, the the CPU die, the GPU and memory controller are produced in 45nm and not 32nm.

    Compared to the current GMA 4500MHD graphics adapter, the Graphics Media Accelerator HD got two more shaders leading in 12 execution units (or unified shader cores).

    The performance of the new Graphics Media Accelerator HD graphics card is noticable better than the old GMA 4500MHD (due to the increased number of shaders and in some cases also clock rate). In some games, the GMA HD is even as fast as a GeForce 9400M / ION chipset. On average it should be as fast as the HD 3200 / 4200 by ATI and therefore allow the user to play older and less demanding games in low settings. The driver support is still not as good as for Nvidia and AMD graphics cards. Furthermore, Low Voltage and Ultra Low Voltage Core CPUs contain lower clocked GMA HD graphics and are therefore slower.

    Furthermore, the OpenGL performance is still not very good. E.g. the old Doom 3 and Quake 4 games wont run fluently.

    Similar to the 4500MHD, the GMA HD also offers hardware accelerated HD video functions in the chip. The DXVA Checker lists support for MPEG2 (VLD, IDCT, MoComp, A, C), H264 (VLD, MoComp, IDCT), WMV9 (MoComp, IDCT), and VC1 (MoComp, IDCT) in 72×480, 1280×720 and 1920×1080. A Toshiba Tecra A11 laptop with Core i5-430M CPU decoded Big Buck Bunny (1080p, H.264) using the Windows Media Player using the graphics card with only 0-1% CPU load. When using the VLC which did not support using the graphic card, the CPU load was significantly higher with 8-17% in our tests. The same was noticed with WMV videos (The Magic of Flight 1080p 3-5% versus 7-12%) and VC-1 videos (Elephant’s Dream 1080p 5-8% versus 8-15%).

    The Turbo Boost function of the new Arrandale CPUs also allows the automatic overclocking of the GPU core. The graphics card is only overclocked if the CPU is not fully loaded and the TDP is not fully used.

    •High End: Core i5 520M, 540M, i7 620M: 500-766 MHz
    •Low End: Core i3 330M, 350M: 500-677 MHz
    •Low Voltage: Core i7 620LM, 640LM: 266-566 MHz
    •Ultra Low Voltage: Core i5-520UM, i5-620UM, 640UM: 166-500 MHz
    It is questionable if the Turbo is really often used in current games, as most games also use a lot of CPU time. Therefore, the UM and LM versions of the GMA HD should be a lot slower because of the slow base speed of 166 / 266 MHz.

  23. dear gents, try nyo po ung tablet pc ng mac if okay ung keyboard nya as touch. lapit na kasi ma face out ung laptop computer na my keyboard.

  24. Mura na ngayun yung Y series around 29K na lang.

  25. hi, i’m planning to buy a netbook, but i’m not sure if which is the best between sony vaio and HP. Can you help me on this??

  26. The customer service of Sony Service Center leaves much to be desired. I had a personal HP laptop before which I bought from a friend in the US. I didn’t have the receipt nor the warranty card when i brought it to HP Service Center here in Cebu for repair. Unlike with Sony, all the HP staff had to do was check the serial # in their system to verify if the unit was still under warranty. This only took them a few minutes. Since their system indicated that it was still covered by warranty, they repaired it without any delay.

  27. you know what they say….the more you pay the more you get…..wow..but still my acer aspire s3 is the BEST!!XD

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