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Sony Vaio VGN-NW270F/S review: Sony Vaio VGN-NW270F/S

Sony Vaio VGN-NW270F/S

Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
Matt Elliott
7 min read

Editors' note: This review is part of our 2009 Retail Laptop and Desktop Holiday Roundup, which covers specific fixed configurations of popular systems found in retail stores.

8.1

Sony Vaio VGN-NW270F/S

The Good

Low price; Blu-ray drive; roomy display but still relatively lightweight; great keyboard.

The Bad

Seems to be room for a bigger battery; no media control buttons.

The Bottom Line

The Sony Vaio VGN-NW270F/S is a low-cost, Blu-ray-equipped laptop that makes a great choice for home use and, should you be willing to tote around a 15-inch machine, a decent choice as your everyday, take-it-with-you laptop.

The Sony Vaio VGN-NW270F/S is a stylish, spacious laptop for high-definition fans with low budgets. For a reasonable $699 at Best Buy, the Vaio NW270 outclasses the majority of its mainstream competition by including a Blu-ray drive. Blu-ray movies look crisp and sharp on its wide-screen 15.5-inch display, and they even sound respectable using the Vaio NW270's integrated speakers. Our only real disappointment is with the laptop's battery life; we'd like to see Sony do what Toshiba does with its Satellite E105-S1802 and include a long-running eight-cell battery that sits flush with the system.

Aside from the BD-ROM drive, the rest of the NW270's configuration follows the standard mainstream recipe of the day: Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of memory, and integrated Intel graphics driving Windows 7 Home Premium. It's thin and light for its size, making it worth considering for a primary, do-it-all laptop, but the best usage scenario for the Sony Vaio VGN-NW270F/S is as a smaller, cheaper alternative to a 17- or 18-inch desktop replacement.

Calling a laptop stylish can be an insult because it could mean it's overdesigned to the point where it interferes with its functionality. The Vaio NW270 boasts a unique look and feel but remains comfortable and easy to use. The plastic chassis is textured, with a grooved pattern looks like a fine wood grain, almost bamboolike in appearance. The textured plastic covers the lid as well as the keyboard deck. This model is silver; you can also fine the same configuration in white, pink, and brown.

The touch pad, too, is textured, but in its case, it's a grid of raised dots. The feel is an acquired taste. For the first hour we had the NW270, the touch pad felt too rough, as if we were moving the cursor by dragging a finger over a piece of fine-grit sandpaper. After a short time, we began to like the feel it provides--the polar opposite of the overly glossy touch pads found on HP Pavilions--and found it to be very responsive. The touch pad also features wide vertical and horizontal scroll regions along its right and bottom edges, respectively. The mouse buttons border on being clacky, but they're far from egregious offenders in this regard.

The keyboard mimics the look of Apple's MacBook, with white, Chiclet-style keys. The keys are widely spaced and create a very comfortable typing experience, with good travel with nary a key shortened. Unlike the 15.6-inch HP Pavilion dv6-1375dx, which crams in a separate number pad to the right of the keyboard, Sony wisely leaves it off on the Vaio NW270. As a result, the keyboard is centered beneath the display and feels very roomy.

Despite its obvious entertainment appeal, the Vaio NW270 doesn't feature a strip of media control keys; you'll need to use the F keys to pause, fast forward, rewind, and control the volume. In addition to the power button, only three other buttons reside above the keyboard: a mute button, a handy Web button opens your default browser, and a third that turns the display off and on.

The 15.5-inch screen features a cinematic 16:9 aspect ratio and a 1,366x768-pixel native resolution, making it a perfect fit for 720p HD video. Despite the presence of a Blu-ray drive, it's not a full 1080p display. The screen has a glossy coating to spiff up the appearance of movies and photos, and while it does help make colors pop and movement look smoother, it might be the least-glossy glossy screen we've seen, so glare and reflections are not a problem. Also not a problem: the integrated speakers, which reach a respectable level and max volume, even if we've heard better.

You'll find a useful assortment of ports and connections on the NW270. HDMI is featured, for outputting video to an HDTV, as is VGA for connecting to older computer monitors. FireWire (i.Link in Sony's parlance) makes the cut, joining a trio of USB 2.0 ports. Rounding out the expansion options are a multiformat media card reader and an ExpressCard/34 slot (not that we can recall the last time we ran across an ExpressCard/34 device).

The NW270's highlight feature is its optical drive. It's capable of playing Blu-ray discs and reading and writing DVDs and CDs. Blu-ray support typically shows up on larger, pricier laptops, though it has started to trickle down the price ladder. To wit, the 17.3-inch HP Pavilion dv7-3065dx features a Blu-ray drive and costs $729.

On CNET Labs application benchmarks, the Vaio NW270 is well-matched among the current crop of mainstream laptops. It does so at $699, which is at the low-end of the price scale for laptops featuring a Core 2 Duo T6600 processor or an equivalent chip. It uses 800MHz DDR2 memory, slower than the 1,066MHz memory found in competing laptops, but its performance scores show that the difference in memory doesn't add up to any discernible impact. In fact, the NW270 posted the best scores (by the narrowest of margins) on CNET Labs' Photoshop and iTunes tests.

Juice box
Vaio NW270 Average watts per hour
Off (60 percent) 0.46
Sleep (10 percent) 1.14
Idle (25 percent) 11.34
Load (5 percent) 41.31
Raw kWh 46.34
Annual energy cost $5.26

The Vaio NW270 uses a standard six-cell battery and lasted 3 hours, 36 minutes on CNET Labs' demanding battery drain test. That's nearly an hour longer than the similarly configured Sony Vaio NW125's time of 2 hours, 49 minutes when we reviewed it earlier this year. The Toshiba Satellite E105-S1802 uses an eight-cell battery, however, and provides almost an hour more running time on a single charge.

Though purchased at retail stores, Sony's basic one-year parts-and-labor warranty applies to the Vaio NW270. Support is accessible through a 24-7 toll-free phone line and an online knowledge base. Also, driver downloads for this model can be found at Sony's support Web site.

Multimedia multitasking test
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Adobe Photoshop CS3 image-processing test
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Find out more about how we test laptops.

System configurations:

Dell Inspiron 1470-3282
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 1.3Hz Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 ULV; 4096MB DDR3 SDRAM 1066MHz; 32MB (Dedicated Video)/1291MB (Total) Mobile Intel GMA 4500MHD; 320GB Seagate 7200rpm

Dell Studio 1745-3691MBU
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T6600; 4096MB DDR3 SDRAM 1066MHz; 32MB (Dedicated Video)/1695MB (Total) Mobile Intel GMA 4500MHD; 500GB Seagate 7200rpm

HP Pavilion dv4-1555dx
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T6600; 4096MB DDR3 SDRAM 1066MHz; 64MB (Dedicated Video)/1695MB (Total) Mobile Intel GMA 4500MHD; 320GB Hitachi 7200rpm

HP Pavilion dv6-1375dx
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P7450; 6GB DDR3 SDRAM 1066MHz; 64MB (Dedicated Video)/1695MB (Total) Mobile Intel GMA 4500MHD; 500GB Seagate 7200rpm

HP Pavilion dv7-3065dx
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 2.4GHz AMD Turion II Ultra Dual-Core M600; 4096MB DDR2 SDRAM 800MHz; 320MB (Dedicated Video)/1982MB (Total) ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4200; 500GB Seagate 7200rpm

Sony Vaio VGN-NW270F/S
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T6600; 4096MB DDR2 SDRAM 800MHz; 128MB (Dedicated Video)/1759MB (Total) Mobile Intel GMA 4500MHD; 320GB Samsung 5400rpm

Toshiba Satellite E105-S1802
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P7450; 4096MB DDR2 SDRAM 800MHz; 128MB (Dedicated Video)/1759MB (Total) Mobile Intel GMA 4500MHD; 500GB Toshiba 5400rpm

Toshiba Satellite P505-S8980

8.1

Sony Vaio VGN-NW270F/S

Score Breakdown

Design 8Features 9Performance 8Battery 7Support 7