Sony VAIO VGN-TT190 reviews – ultraportable with features never seen before

Wednesday, December 31, 2008, 4:18
Laptops
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The Sony VAIO VGN-TT190 is the lightest ultraportable in the market that is loaded with the latest features. The $4345 laptop supports 11-inch widescreen along with optical drive, mobile broadband, Blu-ray drive and dual 128GB solid state drives. You will not find these features in any other ultraportable laptop. But these features also contribute significantly to the high price of the notebook.

The TT190 measures 10.8×7.8×1 inches. Though the TT190 is more compact than the Fujitsu LifeBook P8010 but it is not the thinnest ultraportable. The TT190 houses a tray ejecting optical drive which makes it thicker than the Apple’s MAcBook and Toshiba’s Protégé R500. But you must give the credit to the Sony for its lightweight. Though the notebook includes so much additional hardware, it weighs just .28 pounds.

The Sony Vaio TT190’s carbon fiber lid provides it a sleek look. But it also gives you a feel that it might break under slightest of pressure. A more concerning thing is the small keys that are featured in its keyboard. Though the keys are adequately spaced, they are pretty small and measures 1.3×1.3 cm whereas the full size keys measure 1.9×1.9 cm.

The TT190 offers you more feature than any other laptop in its class. The Sony calls TT190 to be the world’s smallest Blu-ray disc player. The 11-inch screen is pretty small for watching HD content. So, the Sony equipped TT190 with HDMI-out port which can stream the Blu-ray movies to HDTV or a projector. But if you don’t want Blu-ray player, you can go for the notebook with dual layer DVD burner which will cost $500 less. The notebook also provides you with two SSDs which have storage space of 256GB. You can also add 320GB of spinning hard drive in place of optical drive.

The TT190 offers all the standard features of an ultraportable laptop. These features include two USB ports, ExpressCard slot, FireWire port and two memory card slots- Memory Stick and Secure Digital. In addition to that it also has a 1.3-megapixel Webcam and fingerprint reader, which is located between the mouse buttons. There are number of options for network connection which include Wi-Fi, mobile broadband and Bluetooth.

The TT190 is powered by 1.4-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo U9400, 4GB of RAM and comes with Windows Ultimate. The processor is power efficient which increases the battery life significantly. The TT190 has amazing battery life of more than 6 hours and 30 minutes. You can also go for high capacity battery which runs for more than 9 hours but it will cost you $100 more.