Hands-on Review: Sony Vaio TZ150

When Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld and held aloft the MacBook Air, he compared it to a slim Sony laptop. This is that Sony: The Vaio TZ150.

At just 2.7 pounds, the TZ150 is 10 percent lighter than the Air, but it's got a smaller screen, too: Just 11.1 inches to the Mac's 13.3. At 1.2 inches thick, it's also fatter than the Air, but I'm not sure that's a measurement anyone actually cares about. Weight, in my mind, is a far more important issue, and considering the TZ150 comes with an optical drive that the MacBook Air lacks, the extra half an inch is worth it.

The Air has been criticized for a number of omissions, notably the aforementioned lack of an optical drive and a dearth of expansion ports. The TZ150 has a full double-layer DVD burner, VGA output, a Memory Stick Pro slot and an SD card slot, microphone jack, and 2 USB ports. Ethernet, FireWire, modem, and ExpressCard port are all included. The TZ also has dedicated media playback controls. The Air has none of that, just a mini-DVI jack and one USB port.

The TZ's real killer feature, though, is its inclusion of a 3G radio courtesy of Sprint. It has the usual Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but adding 3G to the mix makes the machine so much more useful. Even the keyboard, shrunken down to fit the 11.1-inch chassis, is surprisingly easy to type on, and you can do so from anywhere.

Sounds good so far, right? Well, unfortunately the TZ has some flaws that make it difficult to recommend. The most glaring problem is performance. The TZ is slow at just about everything. Slow to boot, slow to run apps, slow to respond to requests. Even Task Manager calls take forever to become usable. Though it packs a 1.06GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, it just doesn't do much with it. In fact, I've rarely, if ever, seen benchmark scores this low.

The machine is also not very stable, which likely has to do with the scads of extra software Sony always loads its laptops to the brim with. I know Vista isn't the most rock-solid OS out there, but I should at least be able to play a DVD movie without having to reboot. Twice.

Still, there are more plusses: The screen is super bright, battery life is 3 hours exactly, and, though it lacks the postapocalytic styling of the Air, the TZ looks plenty cool. At $2,000, the price isn't out of bounds, but it isn't cheap, either. Though I can't openly recommend the TZ due to its performance issues, it's not a laptop that doesn't have its share of charms.