PenaFire.com

Sony VAIO VGN-UX280P 4.5-inch Laptop Review from David J Humphrey. Excellent device for both work and play, It is very tiny, by far the smallest fully functional computer I’ve ever had. It much larger than a PDA though so users used to putting a PDA in their pocket will not be happy with this. It would fit in really baggy pants pockets I suppose, but not in any pockets for anything I wear. It does fit nicely in my winter coat pocket. It really doesn’t matter to me though as I have a small backpack-like case that I carry it in, along with keyboard, mouse, AC adapter, extra batteries for all, dongle for wired Ethernet/monitor output/NTSC video out, headphones and even an AV cable for connecting to a TV. All of that and it still weighs less, takes up less space and functions as well as any ultra portable I’ve had.

Usability:

The mouse is ok once you get used to it, and the keyboard is really only for small entries and just one step better than an on screen keyboard. Some key combos can be hard to enter but there are ways around that if it bothers you. The screen is very tiny, but also very crisp and bright. It can output to a monitor and display larger resolutions too. The speaker is nothing special, but if I am playing a game or listening to music or watching a movie I would use headphones anyway. I have not played with the cameras much but the webcam is very low quality as would be expected and the main camera was not that impressive either. It can take videos with sound so in a pinch it could take place of a digital camera or video camera but realize it may be much lower resolution that you are used to (it was for me).

I took it on the road last week for the first time and it worked great. It felt weird packing a bag and fitting all my clothes and the computer with all accessories into the same bag. I have been taking two bags for years so this was a noticeable change for me. I unpacked when I got to my room and before you knew it I was checking email, surfing and even played games for a hour or so.

Battery:

The small pack that comes with it looks much better than the extended battery, but also bites as far as life. From my very simple, non scientific testing it seem to last as little as 2 hrs to as long as 4 hrs. The extended one is about double, at about 4 hrs minimum to as long as 8 hrs. Now those figures are from one extreme using it constantly, defragging the hard drive, playing games, wireless on, to the other extreme, wireless off, quite a bit of idle time between tasks, etc.

Hibernate mode works awesome as it should, with saving and resuming each taking less than 20 seconds.

If you don’t mind using standby mode however you can get much more battery life and not really impact the availability of the machine. It takes 5 seconds to go into standby and resumes instantly, and I do mean instantly. Until now I have not had an occasion to use standby since they made the hibernate mode standard years ago, but I have to admit it is handy to put it in standby for a few minutes or even an hour or two if I want to keep it ready to use at a moments notice. This greatly extends the battery life to 12 hrs or more depending on how much you actually are using it. I put it in standby overnight one time and when I woke up it was still had 20% left, not sure how full it was the night before though.

While I admit that it is more of a toy for me, it has some merit in being a very portable unit in between the PDA and ultra portable laptop market. I really hope these don’t go away, as I think it is a very cool idea and as they get even more powerful it could really become a decent gaming platform. Price being the biggest turn off, the second one being size or at least thickness (at least for this unit). Some say it’s too small and others think it’s too big. If it was any smaller I would have a hard time holding it, and any bigger and you lose some of the portability of it.

Software:

I’m running Windows Professional, Open Office, use IE7, Trillian for IM, xfire for gaming IM. I have a 4 gb memory stick that I put a bunch of MP3s on and also a few movies that range from 300mb to 700mb. They actually look quite well on the small screen and with the headphones makes a nice personal media player for moves and music.

Now here’s the real reason I call it my toy: it plays games, a lot of games, only limited by the 40 gb hard drive space. I have a Dell m1710 with a 512mb 7900GTX and I love it, but this thing is small enough to take to work each day and play on breaks and the battery life is good enough to last all day. It plays game much better than I ever would have imagined, party because of the lower resolution and partially because you can turn down the details that you can’t see anyways on such a small screen.

Work great – no issues:

Morrowind

Diablo 2

Warcraft 3

Quake 3

Halo

Half Life

Call of Duty

Counterstrike

MAME works great! Thousands of games

Nesticle NES emulator

GBA emulator

Bunch of smaller simple 3d games, Zuma, Mohjongg, etc

Work great after I worked around minimum 1024×768 screen res issue

Sacred Underworld

Minions of Mirth

Work at very min settings barely playable

Oblivion – had to use Oldblivion patch though

Do not work or did not try

Goldeneye mod for Half Life 2 – suppose HL2 would not work either but did not try

Did not try Call of duty 2 because would take up too much space and COD1 looks great anyway

To check price or purchase Sony VAIO VGN-UX280P 4.5-inch Laptop.

Related posts with Sony VAIO VGN-UX280P 4.5-inch Laptop Review