14 DAY TRIAL // After taking a look at Lenovo's new enterprise-oriented notebooks earlier today, it's now time to check out some other portable systems that target exactly the same segment, namely Sony's latest additions to the S Series lineup.
Before moving to some of the impressive external design changes implemented by Sony within their new notebooks, we'll talk a bit about their hardware, starting with the obvious choice for the CPU, namely the Intel Core i7-2620M, pertaining to the mobile Sandy Bridge family.
Given the fact that business users typically require an impressive level of performance from their portable systems, the new S Series notebooks have also been fitted quite a serious amount of memory (starting with 8GB DDR3 1333Mhz SDRAM), while the basic version also employs SSD drives for much faster boot times.
Moving on to the topic of graphics, we'll have to point out that the system employs Sony's Dynamic Hybrid Graphic System that switches between the built-in GPU unit and the AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series card, either of which pump pixels to the 13.3-inch (33.7cm) VAIO Display Plus with 1366x768 pixels resolution, that also features a special anti-reflective coating.
Battery life has also been improved, while the portable system also supports the addition of a secondary, external battery, that practically doubles the available level of functioning autonomy.
Now that we've talked about the hardware powering the new S Series notebooks, it's about time to mention a few of the external design improvements, starting with the wide aluminium palmrest and magnesium case, completed by a concealed hinge mechanism.
Last, but certainly not least, it's also extremely important to point out that the S Series notebooks are indeed super-slim (just 24mm thick), but also quite lightweight (just 1.75 kilos).
Unfortunately, while Sony does inform us that the brand-new S Series notebooks will arrive in stores across Europe over the course of March/ April 2011, no pricing details have been provided just yet, probably due to the fact that they vary largely, depending on the specific market.