The Sony Vaio TZ model has been mentioned several times during Steve Jobs’ MacWorld 2008 keynote, when the Apple founder unveiled the ethereal MacBook Air notebook. Sony's notebook was quoted almost each time Jobs needed a reference for ultra-portability.

He was not wrong in his choice, as the Vaio TZ model is Sony's flagship ultra-portable laptop PC. This is understandable, since Sony has become famous for its notebook designs. Apart from its portability, the notebook features an impressive hardware specifications set that perfectly reflects its pretty consistent price tag.

The Sony Vaio TZ weighs less than 1.3 kilograms and comes with a 11.1-inch LCD-backlit display with XBRITE-HiColor that can display a maximum resolution of 1366×768. It is built around an Intel ULV U7500 Core 2 Duo processor with a core clock of 1.06GHz, and comes with 1GB DDR2 (that can be expanded up to 2GB), 100 GB of storage on a 1.8-inch Toshiba hard disk drive, but the users can opt for a more expensive, SSD-enabled version. The notebook comes with a built-in DVD+-RW optical drive.

The built-in optical drive makes it the favorite among the other high end ultraportables, such as Toshiba’s R500 and Panasonic’s W7. Its neat and cool design is another strong point: the notebook is extremely thin, almost ethereal, and features spaced-out keys, just like the MacBook air model. The green LED on the side power button adds a plus of elegance to the already-good looking notebook.

The notebook, however, has some limitations. The 1.8-inch disk would offer lower performance than a standard 2.5-inch notebook hard-disk. Replacing it with a 64 or 32 GB of solid-state drive will help a lot, but will blast the buyer's budget way beyond the already-high price tag. Moreover, the Vaio TZ model comes with a single DDR2 memory slot that allows the user to enjoy a maximum of 2 GB (which is not quite enough if you plan to run Windows Vista, for instance).