Sony VAIO EB12FX/T: High Style Without the High Price

The Sony VAIO EB12FX/T is definitely an affordable all-purpose notebook that impresses with its fashion, functions, and cost-effective price--but it's also marred by mediocre overall performance. It seems wonderful and has nearly all of the features you would anticipate in a very notebook costing about $750. The earthy brown complete, slim design, and clean layout certainly make it far more appealing than most sub-$1000 notebooks, but it if you require a laptop for heavy-duty tasks, playing games, or long battery daily life, you may have to seem elsewhere.

Sony's VAIO line has extended been known for its excellent aesthetics, as well as the EB12FX/T is no exception. A brown notebook may appear like an odd style choice, however the deep earthy/coffee tone Sony has chosen performs really well and serves to conceal blemishes and fingerprints. Along with the system is blissfully uncluttered by clunky added buttons or switches. You will not even observe, initially, that it's loaded with a fine selection of well-placed ports. The right side has three USB ports, all in front of the optical generate, wherever they are much less difficult to acquire to. The left side has the ethernet port in the back again through the electrical power plug, in which it belongs, although the VGA plug, HDMI, and eSATA/USB combo port are up front. Even an ExpressCard slot is there. Memory card visitors and also the headphone/mic ports are along the front edge, producing them easy to access even in cramped environments (like that airplane tray table).

If the VAIO scores some usability factors for its outstanding range and placement of ports, it loses some for its keyboard. The chiclet-style keyboard is accompanied by a complete numeric keypad, which tends to make things somewhat cramped on a 15.5-inch widescreen notebook. The arrow keys are half-size and jammed in awkwardly below the enormous appropriate Shift important, while the left Ctrl key is also small--we usually hit its neighboring Fn key by error when making use of widespread copy/paste shortcuts.

The touchpad operates nicely adequate, and it is offset from the middle of the device for being lined up with all the middle in the spacebar. We're utilised to seeing greater 17-inch notebooks with numeric keypads, but the complete factor would seem a little cramped on the 15.5-inch model, and that off-center touchpad is much more of an issue with the scaled-down display dimension, as well. The display looks really excellent, with vibrant and in some cases lighting and off-axis viewing that is certainly far better than on most other inexpensive laptops. Issues get a little washed-out if you drop the brightness down, although not to your diploma we have seen on several other notebooks.

Apart from a keyboard layout that is certainly cramped throughout the edges, the greatest flaw inside the EB12FX/T is its functionality. The dual-core 2.13GHz Core i3-330M just just isn't a barn-burner by contemporary requirements. It's good for your basics--Web browsing, e-mail, easy 2D and Web-based games--but it really is painfully sluggish with regards to a lot more full-featured games, audio or video processing, or other processor-intensive duties. Fortunately, Web-based video looks fairly excellent, now that Adobe Flash 10.one Beta 3 incorporates support for the integrated Intel High definition graphics. We ended up ready to watch full-screen hi-def 1080p clips from YouTube and Hulu movies without having any stuttering or skipping. As constantly, realize that Intel's integrated graphics are unsuitable for enjoying contemporary 3D games nicely. The mediocre processing power in this VAIO design would be much more acceptable in case the battery existence was great, but at three hours and 22 minutes, it really is surely not on the best in the pack.

If you're searching for a stylish notebook which has a very good exhibit, excellent placement of ports and plugs, as well as a full keyboard with numeric keypad, the Sony VAIO EB12FX/T fits the bill, with a few caveats. You will not pay a whole lot, but neither will you get outstanding functionality or battery daily life.