1. Flat But No Design Flub

The ultra portable and thin and light models in Sony's Vaio range have always wowed with their special design. Sony continues this tradition with the Z1 series. The PCG-Z1SP is very elegant and flat. The height of the business notebook at its front edge is just shy of 24mm; when closed, it measures 40mm at the back. We think that a somewhat thicker front part would make typing more relaxing. Including the 48.8-Wh battery, the system weighs little more than 2.1 kg. While that makes the device really "bearable" in all walks of life, a larger-sized battery would increase mobility substantially. After all, devices such as IBM's T-40 offer capacities of 70 Wh and upwards.

Inside, a Pentium-M with 1.5 GHz and an Intel 855PM chipset power the system, while wireless-LAN functionality based on the 802.11b standard is provided by Intel's Pro/ Wireless 2100 mini PCI card. This makes the PCG-Z1 a Centrino device, through and through.

Why Sony went for the 1.5 GHz Pentium-M model and not the slightly faster 1.6 GHz variety becomes clear after casting a glance at the price difference between the two models.

It makes a respectable savings of more than $200 that Sony has invested in a 60 GB hard drive, among other features. Why on earth they settled for the Mobility Radeon and 16 MB video memory for an antiquated and, against the latest mobile GPUs from ATI, underperforming graphics solution remains a mystery though. Perhaps they salted away so much money on the design that the calculation on this score meant that there was no more money in the pot for more contemporary features.