Vaio U Views

• Electronics

In December 2004, Sony USA introduced an American model, the VGN-U750. It is identical to the U70, but has an upgraded CPU of 1.1  GHz with 2m MB of cache. It forgoes the Japanese Sony DoVaio media application for an English version of Sony VAIO Media as its media player application. In mid-February 2005, Sony USA's website stopped selling the U750.

The Sony Vaio UX Micro PC is an Ultra-Mobile Portable Computer (UMPC) that weighs around 490-544 g (1.20-1.27 lb) with a slide-out hardware QWERTY keyboard, touchscreen, Intel Core 2 Solo processor, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and WWAN. Though not officially stated as such, and even to a point implied by Sony that the UX is a move in a new direction and not a specific continuation of such, the Sony UX is speculated by some to be the newest model in the popular Sony U-series. However, there is still debate over whether UX is a genuine Micro PC or not.

The touch screen can be calibrated via an included utility, but we found no reason to recalibrate from the default settings. Other bundled programs include the Hardware Diagnostics application, software keyboard, and video download manager. Like all VAIOs, Sony included the VAIO Control Center and Power Management utilities. Adobe Photoshop Album 2 Starter Edition and Microsoft Powerpoint viewer (not a full version of Powerpoint, but capable of running a slide show) round out the media abilities of the UX50. One point worth noting is the relatively weak Wi-Fi performance. Even with all power saving features disabled, we still had trouble even detecting any access point with a signal when our VAIO S480 laptop would register as two bars.

To appease the bench markers out there, we ran SiSoft Sandra 2007, 3DMark 2003, and 3D Mark 2005. Results for Sandra were surprisingly good, clocking in at a Dhrystone 3597, Whetstone 2675 Integer 8275, and Floating 11215. Compare that to the 2GHz VAIO S480, a top of the line VAIO with a Geforce Go 6200 just one year ago, the results are right in line with what we might expect. It should also be noted that Sandra crashed twice while taking benchmarks on the UX50, though all other programs we used were stable, which makes us weary of the results presented here. We did run the tests several time to equate an average score. Also, as can be expected, the integrated graphics chip means no modern 3D games will run with any real level of playability. It was downright painful to watch 3DMark 2005 run.