Sony Vaio Duo 11 review

1 / 8

Windows 8 is designed to work equally well on both tablets and traditional laptop or desktop PCs, so it’s the perfect operating system for the new Sony Vaio Duo 11 ultra-portable tablet hybrid. In its closed form, the Duo is a 21mm thick tablet. Its sensitive and glossy 11in IPS touchscreen picks up fingerprints like mad, but it has brilliant colour reproduction. The 1,920×1,080 display is capable of playing video in glorious High Definition, too. Move a tab at one side of the tablet and the screen hinges open on a plastic support to reveal a narrow keyboard with small, widely spaced keys.

Whether in tablet or laptop configuration, the screen’s orientation rotates freely by default, detecting its position using a combination of accelerometer and gyro sensors to work out the correct orientation for the screen position at any given point. This sometimes meant the screen switched to portrait mode when we were using it with the keyboard open. Fortunately, Sony anticipated the problem and has implemented a convenient solution in the form of a small button on the back of the Duo which enables and disables autorotation at a touch. You can do the same thing by manually disabling rotation in the Screen Resolution settings.

Although the keyboard is small, we were pleased to find that it’s comfortable to use and enabled us to touch-type quickly and accurately almost immediately. The keys are flat, but the wide space between them makes it easy to strike the right letter. There’s no numeric keypad, but there are cursor keys at the bottom right of the keyboard and a full set of function keys. The keyboard is backlit for ease of use in dark environments.

Although there’s no trackpad, there are plenty of other options for controlling your pointer. The capacitive touchscreen responds readily to multitouch gestures with your fingers, but Sony has also provided a double-ended conductive stylus, complete with buttons. This is much better for fine control on the small, high resolution display, making it easier to complete delicate tasks such as selecting and dragging folders within a directory tree.

If you’re not comfortable with touch controls or would rather not lift your hands from the keyboard while typing, there’s also a touchstick controller nestled amid the B, G and H keys that you can use, along with three ersatz mouse buttons below the space bar. You can use these to right-, left- and middle-click just as you would with a more traditional input device. On the back of the Duo, just behind the keyboard, is a pair of volume control buttons, which rest next to one of the integrated stereo speakers. These provide a far richer sound than you’d have any right to expect from speakers of their size, although they’re still a little tinny.

If you demand a bit more of your audio reproduction than the little speakers can provide, there’s a stereo line output that you can use to connect headphones or a pair of speakers. The Duo isn’t exactly overburdened with ports, but the ones it has are useful. There’s a memory card slot that can handle high capacity SDXC and Memory Stick HG Duo cards and a Gigabit Ethernet port. HDMI and VGA video outputs that make it easy to connect a projector, TV or a second screen. There are two USB3 ports, so you can connect high speed external storage devices.

This is particularly handy given that the Duo has an SSD, which gives you a bit less space than you’d expect from a comparatively priced laptop hard disk, but is significantly faster and more robust. Once the space occupied by the operating system restore partition has been accounted for, there’s 208GB of disk space. That’s enough for a fair number of programs and a decent amount of data and, because it’s an SSD, it’s exceptionally fast to boot.

The rest of the specification is also pretty impressive, as you’d expect at this price. The processor is a dual-core mobile Core i7-3517U that runs at 1.9GHz. It has integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000 graphics processing capabilities, which means it can play most 3D games if you drop the quality settings enough. However, although it can manage around 30fps in Dirt 3 at 720p and High Quality if you disable anti-aliasing, we only managed to squeeze 20fps out of Crysis 2 at high quality.

When it comes to raw processor power, our application benchmarks also gave us plenty to be pleased about. An overall score of 59 makes this one of the most powerful ultrabooks you’re likely to encounter. Despite its massive power (we’re used to a more modest Core i5 processor in our ultra-portable laptops) the Duo lasted for around seven hours in our battery tests and runs remarkably quietly, with a fan that you can only hear by pressing your ear to the bottom of the chassis. It didn’t get very warm, either, even after hours of constant use.

As a tablet, the Duo isn’t as light, stylish or comfortable to hold as, for example, Apple’s iPad, but it’s a lot more powerful, has a bigger screen and runs a proper desktop operating system. It’s still reasonably comfortable to sit and hold as you read the paper, watch a film or pass an infographic around a meeting, but its tablet features feel secondary to its capabilities as a laptop. Transforming it from tablet to laptop is awkward and the stand that hinges out to support the screen in its upright position feels a little fragile. The Duo benefits from the new touchscreen applications and features within Windows 8, making it feel much less awkward than previous Windows tablets. Dual-band Wi-Fi, an integrated GPS receiver and Bluetooth support round out the portable-friendly side of the specification.

Taken purely on its merits as a powerful ultra-portable laptop, the Vaio Duo 11’s processor power matches the award-winning Asus 13in ZenBook Prime UX31A. However, its 11in screen, awkward unfolding mechanism and slightly bulky feel in tablet mode means that while it’s a good piece of kit for power users on the move, it’s not quite slick enough to be an award winner.