» Price: $1,999 » Available: From authorised Sony retailers
EVEN geeks want to make a fashion statement today and laptop vendors like Sony are meeting their need.
Its latest Vaio, the VGN-CS26G/V, comes in a range of snazzy colours, including pink, red and brown, splashed across the notebook's curvaceous chassis .
A glossy strip along the edge of the notebook's lid and a touch panel integrated into the speaker housing (just above the keyboard) are other nice touches.
The touch panel provides quick and easy access to multimedia controls such as track forwarding and volume levels.
A row of LED lights will illuminate as you slide your fingers over the responsive touch panel.
When you switch to AV mode on the touch panel, a multimedia bar filled with a range of icons appears at the top of the screen.
The icon designs are not intuitive to the first time user, though.
You need to scroll across the multimedia bar to bring up icon descriptions such as DVD, Photo and Create Movie.
By now, you can tell that Sony has put a lot of thought into the multimedia features of this Vaio, which also comes with an extensive range of bundled software.
The Vaio MusicBox can automatically analyse and organise the songs in your digital music collection into genres such as country, jazz and classical music, among others.
There is also Sony's Vaio Media Plus, which can stream digital media content on your PC to other devices in your home network.
The devices, however, must be certified by the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), a vendor group that promotes seamless communication among consumer electronic products.
Sony has packed into this Vaio an Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 2.4GHz processor, 3GB of DDR2 memory, a 320GB hard drive and the Nvidia GeForce 9300M graphics processor.
The Vaio VGN-CS26G/V handles everyday computing tasks with ease.
I managed to squeeze about 2.5 hours out of its battery to type out this review, watch a programme on CNet online TV, play MP3 tunes and surf the Internet.
The only bugbear: a slight delay in task-switching if memory-intensive applications such as Second Life are running in the background.
As expected, the visuals from DVD movies appear gorgeous with rich and vibrant colours on the Vaio's brilliant 14.1-inch display.
The built-in speakers that are somewhat lacking in bass are the only letdown.
Final say
Even if you are not big on multimedia, Sony's trademark build quality and the elegance of this head-turning Vaio will win you over.
This story was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life.
