Sony Vaio P-series netbook (VGN-P11Z/R)

Battery Life

One of the benefits of being part of a larger publishing house is that we’re able to see a much broader perspective of products than ever before. Luckily with the Sony P-series, we’ve been able to test both the entry-level (this one) and flagship models (the P19VN/Q) in order to gauge the range of battery life we can expect.

As standard, the P19VN/Q comes with both the standard and extended batteries – part of the reason why it costs so much – while the P11Z/R only comes with the standard battery. With the standard battery, we found that, depending on the usage model, you’ll get anywhere between two and three hours of use out of the P11Z/R.

This didn’t change much on the P19VN/Q even though it features an SSD instead of the mechanical hard drive in the entry-level model. However, with the extended battery that comes with the P19VN/Q, you’ll get between four and six and a half hours – again, depending on your usage patterns.


The lower end of the spectrum is with wireless radios turned on and the screen brightness set to a respectable level (i.e. where you could actually clearly make out what’s on in a well-lit room), while the higher end is with wireless turned off and the screen brightness turned down. We like to refer to this as ‘aeroplane mode’, as screen brightness isn’t so much of an issue if you’re working in a dark area (like on an overnight flight) and almost every airline demands that you turn wireless radios off for the duration of the flight.

In short, the battery life with the extended battery is great and matches the Samsung NC10’s excellent battery life, but you’re not going to get much time on the standard battery – even if you don’t need to connect to the outside world. That’s quite a concern in our eyes, because the Sony P-series is designed for those times when you’re out on the move.

Conclusion

The Sony P-series is one of the most incredible pieces of technology we’ve ever seen, but it’s also one of the most fundamentally flawed. Take the LCD as an example: packing a 1,600 x 768 native resolution into a screen with an eight-inch diagonal is simply phenomenal, but it’ll alienate a large potential userbase because you really need a magnifying glass to read even fairly normal sized text.

We’re big fans of tight pixel pitches, but this decision baffles us, no matter how impressive it is from a technological standpoint. It makes us wonder exactly what the motivations were for the product when it was still on the drawing board – it’s as if Sony tried to pack as much technology into a pre-determined form factor in order to showcase its major breakthrough in panel technology.

In terms of software, Xross Media Bar has its uses, but it's let down by a clunky interface that was designed for navigating with a games controller. There’s also the fact that it feels bloated and laggy when you’re navigating around it, even though the same interface doesn’t exhibit the same problems on a PSP.

We also can’t forget Windows Vista, which simply has far too much overhead for the hardware packed inside the P11Z/R’s tiny chassis – Sony has fitted 2GB of RAM as standard, but that’s only going to help so much when the rest of the hardware is inherently not fast enough to handle Vista’s excess baggage. Excess baggage has never been cheap and you pay through the nose for it – in more ways than one – with the P-series. When basic tasks like doing your email and writing Word documents come with headaches, the computing experience cannot be described as anything near pleasant – quite the opposite in fact because tasks like these aren't exactly rocket science.

Ultimately, the Sony P-series is so close, but so far from being a wonderful technological achievement – the geek inside us wants to love it, but reality tells us otherwise. It has failed because of poor software choices and some questionable design decisions that hinder the overall computing experience. Maybe we’ll see a revised version come along at a later date, but for now the Sony P-series is one to avoid – just don't let its gorgeous figure give you that warm fuzzy feeling because beauty is only skin deep here.

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• 3/10

• Ease of Use
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Score Guide