General Listing

I bought a TZ32 after considering a shortlist of the following ultraportable laptops –

Asus eee pc 7/10″
Kohjinsha SA1F00A 7″
Macbook Air 13.3″
Lenovo Thinkpad X60/X61 12.1″
Asus U1F 11.1″
HP Compaq “ultralights” 12.1″
Sony SZ 13.3″
Sony TZ 11.1″
Toshiba R500 12.1″

I had thought about my requirements carefully and decided that I needed two machines – a serious bad boy machine at home (big CPU, huge RAM, and mega hard drive, with a 24” screen), which I actually already had, and a true ultraportable which would act as my on-the-road machine.

As I travel a lot, in planes, trains and automobiles, cafes, bars, restaurants etc, this demands a very special type of laptop. It needed to be small, robust, very light, long battery life. My software demands were limited – I didn’t need it to run games – but it needed to be able to run Windows XP or Vista with the full range of Microsoft office products, plus some pdf’s. It therefore didn’t need a big CPU, graphics chip or even a big memory.

It also needed to start up fast and have mobile broadband (WWAN) and other good connectivity with wifi (WLAN), bluetooth and usb devices, so I could browse the web fast and download large emails with document attachments. I needed the mobile broadband because I didn’t want to waste time running around trying to find wifi hotspots and doing the setup for them.

Other requirements included a decent keyboard as I do lots of typing, a decent sized screen, and a camera and microphone for conference calls. I had no need for a tablet laptop.

I bought the Sony TZ because it ticked all my requirements and because it looks and feels so unbelievably sexy. It took me a while to decide, as I had to battle with my conscience over its cost which made me break into a cold sweat every time I looked at the price tag. In the end I decided you only live once…

Was it worth it? Well, generally it lives up to its reputation as a great machine, but if you want to hook it up to another mobile broadband provider than T-mobile (in the UK), you can, but don’t expect much help from Sony. Luckily there is a lot of help in various internet forums like this one:- http://3g.co.uk/3GForum/showthread.php?p=365217 . The other thing they don’t tell you is that in order to get a long battery life, it takes a long time to charge – maybe 5 hours for a full one, so you might need a spare battery if sometimes you can’t afford to wait that long. Sony, like a lot of other manufacturers (most?), now don’t provide you with any recovery disks for the software it comes with, particularly the Vista operating system. So as you lovingly unpack one of the sexiest pieces of equipment on the planet, you read the instructions which tell you that you can’t use it until you have created your own recovery disks. In my case, it took me two hours to go out and buy the high capacity DVD’s necessary to back up the system and then to actually do it. Personally, I think that’s a little cheap - then you get over it and life’s great again.

I forgot to say in my original comment that I wanted to change the mobile broadband provider to Vodafone, which was not the most straightforward operation. Initially the Vodafone helpdesk didn't seem to know what to do. First I was told to uninstall the globetrotter connection software and then when that didn't work to reinstall it. It then took another attempt before I got through to the right department who provided the necessary software to get the connection to work.

What was a bit worrying about the whole process, if you're not a geek, is that there is no obvious instruction manual to follow - so its a bit of a trial and error procedure - but its not really what you want to be doing when you've just bought such an expensive piece of equipment!