Sony's latest Centrino notebook is small and light, and it can watch you while you work. Check out our first take.
If the new Sony VAIO PCG-TR1 series evokes some déjà vu, you're not insane. This 1.4kg Centrino ultralight resembles two other laptops--the Fujitsu LifeBook P series and Sony's own discontinued PictureBook. The VAIO TR1's 270x34x188mm case reminds us distinctly of the former, especially since both offer internal DVD/CD-RW drives. But while the Fujitsu's drive is conveniently swappable with other modules, such as a secondary battery, the VAIO TR1's drive is fixed.
One of the major gadget-freak hooks for the TR1 is the embedded digital camera. This tiny camera swivels above the VAIO TR1's 10.6-inch display. Speaking of the display, we're curious if its new Xbrite technology, which Sony claims makes the screen twice as bright, makes for a superior viewing experience. We'll find out in our full review, coming soon. We're also curious to know if the VAIO TR1's Centrino technology, including an ultra-low-voltage 900MHz Pentium M processor, will boost performance and battery life as it has on other notebooks and tablets. Sony claims a battery life of up to seven hours for the TR1, which would make it a leader amongst truly ultraportable laptops. As a true Centrino laptop, use of the integrated WiFi antenna will naturally cut that seven hours down quite a bit, and we're curious to see how much real usable grunt it has.
The TR1 ships with a relatively weak 256MB of SDRAM, although that's upgradeable to 1GB; we'd suspect anyone needing serious grunt would want to up this, and rather quickly.
Sony has managed to cram quite a lot into the TR1's tiny casing; a single Type II PC Card Slot, stereo speakers, 2 USB 2.0 ports and an integrated CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive. One of the few tradeoffs that Sony's made with the TR1 is the speed of the burner; a paltry 8x CD-R and 4x CD-RW write speed means you'll be waiting a while to finalise discs on the TR1.
We're already sure of one thing: the VAIO TR1 has Sony written all over it. It sports several of the company's trademarks, including a Memory Stick Pro-compatible slot, an iLink (a.k.a. FireWire) port, and a heap of Sony's own multimedia software, such as PictureGear Studio. At first glance, all of this yields a great-looking, highly portable laptop with some unique features. But is the system too small to be usable for many travellers? We'll answer that question in our upcoming review.
Sony Vaio PCG-TR1
Company: Sony Australia
Price: AU$4,299
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 1300 137 669
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