Music lovers might want to plug in external speakers.Ĭlick to enlargeLike the E205, another Best Buy Blue Label notebook, the S series packs Intel's new Wireless Display technology (WiDi), which lets users wirelessly beam photos and videos from their notebook to a monitor or television. The speaker strip located above the keyboard produced loud enough sound, but the quality, on everything from Queen's "Under Pressure" to the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again" sounded tinny. However, we needed to tilt the display back a bit to get the best picture. And despite having a glossy finish, we enjoyed decent viewing angles from the sides and reflections were bearable. The bright 13.3-inch (1366 x 768) glossy display on the VAIO S delivered good image quality when we watched a Saturday Night Live clip from Hulu. The sound was loud and accurate, though, and the audio and video were in sync with one another. The webcam's 1.3-megapixel photos and VGA video both showed bland, muted colors and not very sharp image quality. The S series has dual memory card slots (for SD Cards and Memory Sticks), as well as an ExpressCard/34 slot on the right. By comparison, the $899 Toshiba Satellite E205, also a Blue Label notebook, has eSATA, a slot-loading (as opposed to a tray-loading) DVD burner, and a USB port that charges gadgets even while the notebook is sleeping.
The only thing missing, some nitpickers might argue, is a dual USB/eSATA port for faster backups. The Vaio S series' selection of ports include three USB, HDMI and VGA out, Firewire, an Ethernet jack, and headphone and mic ports. Many other systems reach well over 100 degrees. We measured 90 degrees on the touchpad, 95 in the center of the keyboard, and 98 on the underside of the laptop.
The S series remained cooler than many other notebooks after we played a Hulu video at full screen for 15 minutes.