Sony Vaio Duo 11 review

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.