List Price: $799.99
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Customer review from the Amazon Vine Program When I first received this laptop, I had mixed feelings it looks beautiful, but it seemed slower than it should have been given the hardware specs and the hybrid drive. After a week of using it, I can say now that absolutely love it it is quiet, runs smooth and cool and feels very zippy. I don't love windows 8 but the laptop itself is dead quiet and stays nice and cool and very responsive. It wakes up from sleep almost instantly (I don't ever shut it down unless I have to, mostly I just let it go to sleep the power LED will flash when it needs to be plugged in, another nice touch) and it has a long enough battery life so that I don't have to keep it plugged in all the time.
The brushed aluminum finish on the cover is absolutely gorgeous it looks and feels like a high quality laptop, exactly what you would expect with the Ultrabook designation. However, I'm not sure about the ultrabook qualifications I read that the minimum specs for that designation was a 5 hr battery life and this one falls a little short of that (that's why I dinged it a half a star). It's also a little bit thicker and heavier than what I would have expected from an Ultrabook. However, if it were too much lighter I think it might feel kinda cheap and flimsy, so the weight is good for me.
I think the initial feeling that it's performance was not up to par for the hybrid dive was because it takes a little time to build up the cache on the ssd portion of the drive which means that it gets faster as you use it longer. After a week of use, you can really tell the difference that the hybrid drive makes in speed almost as good as having a pure SSD drive, but you get much more space.
This screen on this bright and crisp videos and pictures look fantastic, as do web pages. And I really don't notice much difference between the 14inch screen and the 15inch screen I had before, but overall, the 14 inch actually seems like a much better size for portability. The touchscreen is nice and responsive, but unfortunately when you look at it with the screen off, you can see where your fingers have been all over the screen. not sure much can be done about that.
I will say this DON"T EVER BUY A WINDOWS 8 COMPUTER WITHOUT A TOUCHSCREEN! It is just too hard to get around and to get the charms bar to pop up without a touchscreen I've tried setting up other peoples laptops running windows 8 without a touchscreen and it was a complete exercise in frustration. This one is much easier to navigate around because of the touchscreen.
Apps in the windows 8 store are pitiful tho, very few official apps (google, facebook, pinterest, etc) and the ones they offer instead are cheap cheesy homebrew versions. The kindle app also appears to be broken in the latest release says it encountered an error trying to register. The lack of quality apps is really disappointing, as is the fact that you can no longer sync google contacts and calendars with the windows apps. As is Microsoft's decision to make you toggle between the touch interface and the desktop very kludgy sometimes I will download and run something from the browser and think it is not responding only to toggle back to the desktop and see that it is running there novice users will have a hard time with this I'm sure. I am hoping they will release a windows 9 soon that fixes all the horrible awkwardness of windows 8, or that Google will release a stand-alone Chrome/Android install for PC's (and I have read that Windows 8.1 is inn beta and hopefully that will fix some of the shortcomings). I have a feeling that this laptop would absolutely fly if it were running Chrome.
My only complaint, and it's a minor quibble, is the corners are kinda sharp and not rounded, so sometimes I stab my wrist on the front corners.
This laptop is also cooler and quieter than any laptop I've ever used. Even under heavy processor load, the bottom doesn't get very warm at all, and the fans run very quietly even when kicked up to high.
Overall, I give this laptop a 4.5 out of 5 stars, particularly at this price point, with the only deduction in half a star being for the slightly shorter battery life than you would expect from an Ultrabook. This is probably one of the nicest ultrabooks you can get for this price.
*** Update just for fun I ordered the Corsair Vengeance 4GB (1x4GB) DDR3 1600 MHz (PC3 12800) Laptop Memory for sale here on Amazon for $35 (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006EWUP4Y/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1) to up the total RAM on this to 8gb and it is noticeably faster now. Install of the memory couldn't have been easier, Sony was kind enough to leave the top RAM slot open, so I just unscrewed the small square on the bottom (middle towards the top near the screen) and slid the memory right in (memory slides in at a slight angle then you snap it down into place). Took a whole 30secs. I mainly did it just to see if it was worth it, since memory is so cheap, and I would have to say yes it is definitely worth it, as the laptop practically flies along now, and for $35 bucks it's hard to argue with an extra 4gb of memory and a boost in speed.
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