Innovative Sony Laptop Is King of the Lightweight Hill

6. MobileMark 2005, Continued

MobileMark 2005 Battery Life And Performance Benchmarks: Conclusions

The Sony VAIO VGN-T350P performed commendably on the MobileMark 2005 Productivity performance and response time tests. It bested both the Fujitsu and Toshiba lightweight laptops we previously tested.

The VGN-T350P's battery life tests are astounding. This tiny laptop, with its small 7.4 V 7650 mAh standard battery, ran for 6 hours and 40 minutes in the MobileMark 2005 Productivity test. The battery lasted for a whopping 7 hours and 26 minutes reading an eBook, and 5 hours and 18 minutes playing a DVD - that's enough time to watch two or three DVDs. Neither the Fujitsu nor the Toshiba's have built-in DVD drives; we require a built-in drive in order to run the DVD benchmark on a mobile computer. Using an external DVD drive would only work if the drive were powered by the computer's battery, say through the USB bus. Not all mobile computers support external DVD drives that are bus powered, which is why we require a built-in DVD drive.

The VGN-T350P kept going for 5 hours and 58 minutes doing wireless LAN-based web browsing. How about the Sony's EDGE-based wireless WAN adapter? We got a chance to answer that question during a long session at the Marriott Hotel in Marina Del Rey, California. Sitting in a basement meeting room, we turned on the WWAN adapter and periodically browsed the Internet, managed our e-mail, and downloaded files of various sizes. The laptop's battery lasted over 5 hours. And as a testament to EDGE service - at least in that area - we never once lost the Cingular signal during those 5+ hours.