Sony Vaio Z series: Ultrapowerful ultraportable laptop

Blithely ignoring the ongoing econopocalyse in the manner of a man tap-dancing through a minefield, Sony has announced an extremely powerful yet ultraportable laptop. The 13.3-inch Vaio Z series is packing some serious canned heat in its 1.45kg carbon-fibre chassis.

Intel Core i7 tech is the explosive fuel of this pocket rocket, with the top-end VPCZ11Z9E offering a 2.66GHz i7-620M CPU that can reach 3.33GHz with Intel Turbo Boost. Nvidia's GeForce GT 330M provides the oomph for graphics, while a mighty 6GB of 1,066MHz RAM should get the best out of Windows 7 Professional.

Other premium touches include a "precision-machined" aluminium wrist rest, a 'Full HD' 1,920x1,080-pixel display, a 256GB solid-state drive and HDMI out. An automatic graphics system analyses what you're doing and chooses how much grunt you need, theoretically saving you battery when you're idling on the Web. A light sensor similarly dims the screen if you don't need much illumination, turning on keyboard lighting if it's dark enough.

Connectivity is provided by 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, built-in 3G and Bluetooth 2.1+EDR. There's also a DVD rewriter, but no Blu-ray option, which we'd expect in such a high-end computer, especially one with a 1080p display. Incidentally, the lower-end VPCZ11X9E downgrades to a 2.4GHz i7-520M CPU, 4GB of RAM, a 128GB SSD and a 1,600x900-pixel display.

No idea of prices yet, but we're not expecting much change out of £2,000 for the VPCZ11Z9E. They'll both be available to the super-rich from March. Click through for another pic.