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I've recently received a $2400 SONY VAIO VGN-A270 ordered from www.sonystyle.com and I want to share my first impression here.
Besides the laptop, battery and wall charger, the box contained a wireless mouse, an AOL CD and a flimsy "Quick Start Guide". There was no document stating the specs of the laptop or a manual describing how to enter the BIOS setup (IF there's a BIOS setup). WinXP Home was preinstalled along with a lot of crap, but there was no WinXP kit CD. I guess I'll have to install an OS of my own, because right now the machine runs VERY slow for a 1.8GHz Centrino CPU.
But, I might run into trouble doing that, because a lot of controls on the laptop are very software: the volume control (!), the brightness control, and one of the CD eject buttons. Fortunately, the CD has an extra tiny bump used for eject, which is not very easy to find. But if you use an OS that doesn't support these buttons of if you simply kill the processes that deal with buttons and OSD display (for brightness and volume), you won't be able to adjust them from the buttons.
The ergonomicity of the A270 is quite poor: there is no volume knob but two buttons placed near the screen hinges. So if you watch a movie lying on your back with the laptop over your thighs, you can reach to the front of the laptop where a normal volumen knob would be, but you can't reach to the volume buttons.
Keeping this scenario of watching movies on the couch in darkness, you'll have some hard time distingushing between all the 6 identical buttons (mute, vol-/+, brightness-/+, zoom, software-defined).
The Wireless on/off button toggles both WiFi and Bluetooth, so if you want to preserve power while using the low-power Bluetooth, well I guess you can't.
Which brings me to battery life: I was able to watch 1h25m of a DVD with wireless off, speaker volume set to the maximum (not actually loud) and brightness set to two notches.
Other than these, the keyboard is pretty much OK, but I get annoyed by some pairs of keys being critically close (Fn, the Win key and the Alt; Del, Insert and End). There is more than one inch of unused space to both left and right side of the keyboard, which other 17" manufacturers like HP and Fujitsu used for a wider keyboard layout, including a numeric keypad.
They keyboard LEDs are downright crappy: when one light is on, the other two are also 70% on, so it's not very easy to distinguish whether Num/Caps/Scroll Lock is on. Oh, all three LEDs are green. The other LEDs (WiFi, Bluetooth, Power, HD, Battery, DVD) are covered by dirty plastic so they don't look that nice.
Although I don't like the details of the A270, my colleagues were impressed with the screen size and they said it was a cool laptop... So go figure
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VAIO VGN-A270 first impressions
Discussion in 'VAIO / Sony' started by dandv, Jan 20, 2005.
