2011年11月8日星期二

The trouble with Scrabble-tile keyboards

My favourite Sony VAIO TT laptop is on its way out. It was getting a bit long in the tooth (Core 2 Duo CPU), but I love it because it’s small and its carbon-fibre chassis makes it lightweight.All people Wholesale Rustic For Countertops From China Manufacturers ship It’s the laptop I usually grab when I’ll be spending time out of the office, whether with clients or on holiday.

Some people find its 11in screen difficult to view, but even with my dodgy eyesight it’s never been a problem. I love its Scrabble-tile keyboard, too – it’s so much nicer to type on than others I’ve come across.Represent manufacturers of Wholesale Cream Marfil For Wall processing machinery The TT can last a long working day on a single charge even using the standard battery,The Eden Bath line of Wholesale Rustic porcelain For Wall are highly desired due to their naturally random beauty while with the extended battery it will go two full days. It’s a brilliant machine.

Recently, however,Anyone with a Henspa Wholesale Super Black Polished Tiles For Wall can enjoy the satisfaction of raising their own hens and delight in fresh it’s become unreliable: sometimes on return from standby, the trackpad won’t work; other times the Wi-Fi sulks and won’t connect to any networks; sometimes its 3G slot won’t see a perfectly good SIM card sitting in it. It works fine 95% of the time,Buy Hair Wholesale Magic Tile For Wall from top rated stores but that other 5% is becoming irritating.

I’ve been swearing public oaths for ten years that I’ll never buy another Sony product, but I always find myself drawn back to the company, in much the same way Apple fans are drawn back to the Temple of Shiny. My house is full of Sony TVs, radios, cameras, Blu-ray players, camcorders, and a growing collection of innovative laptops.

People complain about Sony’s after-sales service, and this is certainly something I’ve experienced. The company seems to treat laptops much like TVs or Blu-ray players – when a new version of Windows comes out you’ll be lucky to find support for it, and if it goes wrong and you send it to one of the company’s workshops (located somewhere on the European mainland), they’ll sit on it for a month then send it back with the fault uncorrected. I have the T-shirt, but I continue to go back...

However, the replacement for my TT probably isn’t going to be a Sony for one simple reason: the company seems to have abandoned the small (11in), high-spec, low-voltage laptop sector. There isn’t a direct replacement for the VAIO TT in the current catalogue, either in the UK or via importers such as Dynamism. There’s the Z Series of course, but at 13in that’s a fair bit bigger.

The current small-cased Sony Y Series has a lowish AMD-based specification that lacks bells and whistles such as SSD RAID, 3G slots, fingerprint readers and so on. They’re consumer devices, as you’ll see from the review of the bright pink Sony VAIO Y Series – closer to a netbook than to my TT. I have to look for an alternative, and an obvious candidate might be the revised MacBook Air, but lovely as it is, it has serious shortcomings for enterprise applications.

Its biggest problem is the lack of onboard 3G: I’d have to tether it to a phone for connectivity, which I find a faff. I love the simplicity of built-in WWAN connectivity: wherever I am, whichever OS I’m booting, and whether my phone is fully charged or not, I always have instant internet connection.

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