Sony VAIO VGN-TT190 review: Sony VAIO VGN-TT190

Sony's newly revamped ultraportable laptop, the 11-inch Vaio TT, is a well-needed reminder that not every tiny laptop needs to be a low-cost, low-power Netbook-style system.

8.1

Sony VAIO VGN-TT190

The Good

Sleek, carbon-fiber chassis; includes Blu-ray drive and HDMI port; twin 128GB solid-state hard drives, 16:9 display; excellent battery life.

The Bad

Painfully expensive; faster than Atom-powered Netbooks, but still not a speed demon.

The Bottom Line

Small laptops have become synonymous with low-cost Netbooks, but Sony's Vaio TT reminds us why some ultraportables can cost almost 10 times as much (hint: the 256GB SSD helps).

In fact, the $4,344 Vaio TT is about as far from the standard $500 Netbook as possible, given the relative physical similarities. Our review unit represents the TT's highest-end configuration, the TT190UBX, and includes an Intel ultralow-voltage processor paired with an internal Blu-ray-recordable optical drive (making it the smallest available Blu-ray laptop).

The real star power, however, comes from a pair of 128GB solid-state hard drives, which jacks the price up over the $4,000 mark. Naturally, less expensive versions are available, which ditch the Blu-ray and SSD drives and start at $2,094. It's clearly a high-end prestige piece, but if you've got the money to burn, we've seen few laptops as crave-worthy as the Vaio TT190UBX.

Not too long ago, high-end ultraportable laptops were considered desirable status symbols, and many consumers were willing to part with more than $2,000 for a smart-looking, small, easy-to-carry system. With the advent of Netbooks, which covered a lot of the same basic ground (Web surfing, sending e-mail, etc.), everyone's expectations were lowered, and a much more workmanlike industrial design took over.

But the Vaio TT eschews the cheap, plastic look of most Netbooks (and for $4,000, it had better), instead presenting a slick carbon-fiber chassis, incredibly thin LED-backlit display, metal accents, and rounded curves. It's an evolution of the previous Vaio TZ model, which was one of our favorite ultraportables, and shares that model's large, circular hinge, with the power button and A/C jack located at opposite ends of the hinge. Even with its 11-inch screen (Netbooks range in size from 7 to 10 inches), the Vaio TT boasts a Netbook-like sub-3-pound weight, while measuring less than an inch thick.

A handful of other companies are still putting some effort into the high-end ultraportable market--notably Lenovo, with its attractive IdeaPad U110, and Toshiba with its Portege R500, which makes up for a somewhat bland design with some impressive engineering to save space and weight.

The Vaio TT's MacBook-like keyboard has flat, widely spaced letter keys, making for a surprisingly comfortable typing experience, considering the actual keys are hardly larger than those found on something like Dell's 9-inch Inspiron Mini 9 Netbook. Volume, optical-drive eject, and assignable shortcut buttons sit along the bottom edge of the wrist rest, and Sony has managed to fit in both VGA and HDMI outputs, and a mini-FireWire jack, in addition to the usual USB 2.0 ports and SD-card slots.

The Vaio TT's 11-inch screen follows the 16:9 aspect-ratio trend we've seen in new 16-inch and 18-inch laptops. The 1,366x768 resolution isn't too far removed from the 1,024x600 found on most Netbooks, but the slightly larger screen size and finer resolution combine for a much larger work (or play) space. And while the 16:9 aspect ratio matches that of movies and HD content, the small screen and resolution doesn't get you 1080p playback; but the system's HDMI port will have you viewing at 1080p, with an external display that does 1920x1080.