Sony VAIO S Series 13 review

The laptop’s ultra-slim silver lid looks very sleek, but the laptop’s interior is a bit more basic – still silver, but a bit chunkier and – particularly when it comes to the keyboard – more obviously plastic. The widely-spaced flat silver keys are backlit, so you’ll see their clear letters picked out with white LEDs if you use it in the dark. The keyboard isn’t brilliant, although it becomes easier to type on accurately as you become used to it. The keys don’t travel very far when you strike them, which means you don’t get much feedback, while the keyboard itself flexes a little as you type. There’s no numeric keypad, so there’s plenty of room for full-sized keys and a large touchpad with invisible integrated buttons hidden beneath it. We found that the right-hand side of the wrist-rest became almost uncomfortably warm to the touch after the laptop had been running for a couple of hours.

A 500GB hard disk leaves plenty of room for software and storage, even with Windows installed and a recovery partition created. There are two memory card slots – one for high-capacity SD cards and the other for high capacity Sony Memory Stick cards, as well as a DVD-RW drive, two USB3 ports and a single USB2 port. Network connectivity is provided by a Gigabit Ethernet port and 802.11n Wi-Fi.

You can buy the VAIO S in its basic configuration for £769, but almost everything can be upgraded through Sony’s online store. However, swapping out the processor, memory and hard disk for faster or larger models can soon push the price over £1,100, pushing it into the same territory as many thinner, lighter Ultrabooks. If portability is your main concern, and you don’t mind losing the optical drive, the HP Folio 13 costs around £70 less, but if Ivy Bridge performance is a priority the VAIO S looks like good value.