SONY VAIO Duo 11 Convertible Touch Ultrabook Review

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]s it a bird… is it a TABLET… is it a Notebook?  It’s a SONY ULTRABOOK!!  Seriously… this thing is pretty cool.   In fact, it is to date probably the best implementation of touch screen and Windows 8 I’ve seen.  The Sony VAIO Duo 11 is thin enough and small enough to be a very usable field tablet, and powerful enough and feature rich enough to pull of the whole notebook thing incredibly well.  The only thing you MAY miss is a disc drive of some type…  but if you do miss that kind of thing I’d be remiss if I didn’t say “Hardcopy is so yesterday”.  With the USB 3.0 ports, the built-in SD memory card slot (not just a memory stick! Big Kudos to SONY for not going with their proprietary stick, it was the right thing to do because this ultrabook is soooo convenient to use because of it).

The SONY VAIO Duo 11 Convertible Touch Ultrabook is the fastest booting system I’ve seen in a long time.  It has a 128G SSD drive and the thing boots up from pressing the power button to logging in… in a crazy 6 seconds.

SONY VAIO Duo 11 Convertible Touch Ultrabook In Review

When you are in tablet mode it looks like a biggish tablet, it’s still very thin, and because it has a real full blown 3rd gen i5-3337u processor and 6 Gigs of RAM… it has all the power you could need to handle all but the most daunting of tasks.  For instance, we were able to play Need For Speed: Most Wanted on it.  We had to turn the graphics down the lowest setting, but the game ran really very well on it.  So did Far Cry 3.  The Intel HD Graphics 4000 chipset really does a pretty good job.  Is this a gaming machine?  No and that’s the point I’m trying to make.  You can have a killer tablet, an awesome notebook and something that will actually play some of the most graphically intense games albeit on the low setting, but still…

When you are in notebook mode (you flip the screen up and the keyboard underneath is revealed) you have a full-ish qwerty keyboard, a little nub pointer (think IBM Thinkpad pointer) and the touch screen display.  You can go with a USB mouse or Bluetooth your choice if you need a mouse.  The touch portion of the screen in either mode is responsive and quick, and it comes with the full version of Windows 8 thanks to the full 3rd Gen Intel Core i5-3337u Processor.

The Image quality was outstanding, the video was crisp and clear, the games looked terrific, and it had WiDi which was pretty nifty.  Another area the SONY VAIO Duo 11 Touch Ultrabook really shines is art.  It has an exceptional two button stylus and software (Art Rage Pro) that really gives it appeal to anyone that can draw.  With many levels of touch sensitivity you can do complex pencil sketches and charcoal prints.  Very neat stuff.

My only complaint with the SONY VAIO Duo 11 Convertible Touch Ultrabook is the battery life.  I’m not sure I ever got 3 hours out of it even though the specs say 4 hours and 45 minutes.  So be prepared to be tethered to an electrical outlet if you are out for more than 3 hours.  The first unit we got from SONY had an issue with the display (the touch screen didn’t work after a few hours of use, you could see everything but touch was off).  After turning the unit over it was clear that the Duo 11 we received was a pre-production unit (think beta version) so no ding for that issue, the second unit we received had no such problem.  Both units suffered from the same battery issue though and because that was the case in both instances, there was no need to wonder if it was an isolated incident.

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All in all the SONY VAIO Duo 11 Convertible Touch Ultrabook is amazing, it is worth every penny (currently they are going for about $1,200 USD for the unit we reviewed) and I would personally own one.  We are nominating the SONY VAIO Duo 11 Convertible Touch Ultrabook for the 2013 Reviewboard Magazine Editor’s Choice Award.  We give the VAIO Duo 11 Ultrabook 4 out of 5 stars.  Good job SONY.