Sony goes thin, light and really powerful with the VAIO Z

Sony recently showcased their offerings on their VAIO line of laptops and the one that really caught my eye was their flagship model for thin-and-light category, the VAIO Z.

Like typical thin-and-light notebooks, the VAIO Z sports a 13.1″ LED display capable of 1600 x 900 resolution. And like any laptops made by Sony, it looks sleek and durable with its carbon fiber casing which also makes it very light at only 1.3 kg.

Unlike your typical thin-and-light, Sony skipped the CULV processor for the VAIO Z but instead chose Intel Core i5-540M (2.53GHz) as its processor. Coupled with a 6GB DDR3 RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce GT330M (with CUDA) GPU, this laptop packs quite a punch whether it’s for rendering graphics, video production or playing games. Because of this power, battery life can only run up to 5.5 hours. I’ll give it around 3.5 hours if used in the real world which is still remarkable for its specs.

Instead of a hard drive, the VAIO Z comes with a 128GB solid state drive for faster performance and lower power consumption. It also contributes to the light weight of the laptop. A DVD-RW drive is also present on this 13-incher which is pretty uncommon.

Other notable features of the VAIO Z series is its switchable graphics. If  heavy graphics processing is not needed, it will automatically turn to its chip-integrated graphics to save power. Of course, you can easily override this setting with a switch located above the keyboard.

Speaking of keyboard, the VAIO Z also has an ambient light sensor that will illuminate the back-lit keyboard if inadequate light is detected. Really useful for those who does a lot of night computing.

And how much does this thing of beauty cost? Just P149,999 and it comes with a 64-bit Windows 7 Professional license. Can’t hurt to dream huh?