Sony VAIO X Series Netbook

I quickly fell for the golden, brushed-aluminum body and the matching widely spaced keys. (Not feeling flashy enough for the limited-edition gold version, like the one we received The X Series also comes in black.) Measuring 10.95 by 7.29 by 0.55 inches and weighing 1.6 pounds, the X Series out-smalls the MacBook Air and gives the upcoming Dell Adamo XPS a run for its money.

The X Series boasts an 11.1-inch screen that measures merely 0.125 inch thick. The laptop comes with two interchangeable batteries: a standard (3.5-hour) battery and a larger, heavier, battery-and-stand combo that supposedly lasts for up to 14 hours, according to Sony spokespeople. We're still waiting on PC World Labs test results. The additional battery brings the weight of the X Series to approximately 2.2 pounds. (For reference, the popular MacBook Air weighs about 3 pounds.)

Though the laptop may look like a Jaguar, it runs like a Ford Taurus.The ultrathin ultraportable features a 128GB solid-state drive, 2GB of RAM, and a 2GHz Intel Atom Z550 processor. As with the battery, we can't tell you exactly what that means in terms of a WorldBench 6 score just yet--the netbook is still running through our tests. In my subjective tests, the X Series ran Windows 7 Home Premium Edition smoothly enough, though I did find the machine slowing down when I tried to get more than three programs running at the same time.

The X Series features a 1366-by-768-pixel, 11.1-inch LCD screen--theoretically, you could get 720p video to run on this machine. Streaming HD (480p) video from Hulu was fantastic: Image quality was crisp and clear, and colors looked fully saturated. Since the machine supports 720p resolutions, we had to throw our higher-quality test video (of a shuttle launch) at it; the result was a herky-jerky viewing experience, however. Your HD-video mileage will vary.

The LED-backlit screen looks good both indoors and out. At the highest brightness setting, it was still readable in sunlight (using the highest brightness setting, however, will cut the battery life to 2.5 hours on the standard battery and 12 hours on the extra-life battery).The only problem: The higher resolution hurts the VAIO X Series. I, admittedly, have bad eyes, but looking at the tiny screen started to give me a headache after about half an hour. Fortunately, I did have the option of zooming (stutteringly) in.