Sony
VAIO laptops were probably what Windows came closest to a first-class,
MacBook-like experience. After sluggish sales, Sony sold its laptop division in
2014. The VAIO team has slowly rebuilt its reputation as a premium laptop maker
with a limited portfolio. The Z Flip is probably the most versatile. It's a
convertible notebook like many competitors, but it uses one of the most unique
hinge mechanisms I've seen so far.
The hinge though:
The
vast majority of convertibles have taken on one of two form factors: the
Surface-like Tablet with removable keyboard or the Lenovo Yoga-inspired
360-degree flip. Common reservations for the Surface School of convertibility
are thin keyboards and / or slow detachment mechanisms. Not to mention that a click
keyboard on the back of your tablet is not exactly elegant.
The
Z-Flip bypasses both problems with two hinges. One is located on the bottom of
the laptop as usual, and another sits in the middle above the laptop lid. The
screen will be turned over but your keyboard will remain blank. Props for VAIO
to integrate the hinge seamlessly into the design; The horizontal line that
runs through the back wall looks more like an aesthetic flourish than a
mechanical necessity. I just wish the engineers had thought of a more subtle
mechanism for sharing the screen than the anachronistic latch. The rest of the
laptop is solidly built to provide a comfortable portable computing experience.
It's thinner than competitors like the Surface Book, the touchpad is one of the
better Windows devices, and the keyboard is a bit flat but responsive. And
though it's not exactly the most exciting design, the bluish gunmetal that
covers most of the device is noble enough.
The
QHD screen is lively and sharp, with excellent contrast and viewing angles, but
not as good as its XPS 13, Surface Book or MacBook Pro rivals. The panels are
also quite shabby by today's standards, but this can easily be forgiven,
considering how slim the laptop is in relation to its internals. And really,
the Z Flip is deceptively strong compared to the competition. It uses the older
sixth-generation Skylake chips instead of the newer Kaby Lake, but unlike
almost any Windows convertible - which includes 15-watt CPUs - the Flip uses a
powerful 28-watt CPU and Intel Iris graphics cards, what a criminally
understaffed alternative is a low-end graphics chip.
The
only other ultra-portable with a 28-watt CPU and iris is the MacBook Pro, but
that's not exactly convertible. Internals means that I can actually achieve
reasonable frame rates on some older 1080p games, such as Counter-Strike:
Global Offensive (~ 100 + fps) and Tomb Raider (~ 70 fps), as long as the
settings are at a medium level. Apart from the games, the Z Flip generally did
not seem to react much more in everyday life (though fans can get pretty loud
under really heavy loads). This is due to both the higher processor performance
and the faster SSD (the Samsung NVMe SSD achieves a read speed of over 2,000 MB
/ s and a write speed of 1,500 MB / s).
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