Of all the new
laptop designs that attempted to break into the mainstream with the launch of
Windows 8 at the end of 2012, none was bolder than the handful of slider-style
PCs. These brave systems attempted to bridge the gap between laptop and tablet
not by adding detachable screen, but by engineering a slide-out keyboard that
snapped into place at (best-case scenario) a flick of the finger.
The main entries in
this category were the Sony
Vaio Duo 11 and the Toshiba
U925t. Both reminded us more of old-fashioned slider phones than anything
sleek and modern, and neither was particularly favorably reviewed.
I hadn't expected to
see any new slider-style Windows 8 PCs, at least for a while, but Sony has
surprised me with an updated and expanded version of the Duo. This new version
bumps the screen size up to 13 inches from 11 inches, adds new CPUs from Intel's
just-announced fourth-generation Core i-series, and is called the Vaio Duo
13.
While it's still not going to be a mainstream device,
the new Duo 13 takes a stab at rebooting the slider and correcting some of the
things that were so irksome about the original Duo 11. Most importantly, the
sliding mechanism for exposing the keyboard is much-improved and actually opens
and closes easily with a single finger. It's a much smoother experience,
whereas the Duo 11 hinge confused some people
This is also a
larger 13-inch screen in a fairly compact body. The Duo 11 felt like a chunky
11-inch ultraportable laptop/tablet, whereas the new 13-inch design is as thin
and light as any ultrabook-style 13-inch PC (except for Sony's new Vaio Pro 13,
which is amazingly light).
Also a big step
forward is the touch pad. The previous Duo model couldn't fit one on, instead
relying on a small pointing stick (actually a tiny optical sensor) in the
middle of the keyboard. That style of cursor control still has its fans, mostly
in the ThinkPad community, but it's not exactly mainstream-friendly. The touch
pad here is far from perfect -- it's small, like a very short rectangle, but
it's far better than not having a touch pad at all.
However, the single biggest problem with the Duo line
remains, and that's the nonadjustable screen. It has two angles: flat, as in
tablet mode, and up, with the screen angled well past 90 degrees. If you need
to adjust the angle, or just like a more vertical display, you're out of luck
Starting at $1,399
(and going all the way up to $2,700 if you max out the SSD, CPU, and other
options), the Duo 13 is on the expensive side for an experimental laptop/tablet
hybrid. Acer's Aspire
R7 also plays with laptop and tablet design preconceptions, but only asks
$999.
For a more
traditional PC experience, Sony's other new systems, the Vaio
Pro 11 and Pro 13,
are fantastic no-compromise machines. The Duo 13 is ambitious, if less
universally useful, but a definite improvement over the 11-inch original.
Folded flat, the Duo
13 looks at first glance like any other shut ultrabook -- it may take a moment
to even tell that the glossy surface you're looking at is actually the front of
the screen, rather than an overly glossy laptop lid.
At around 2.8 pounds it would make a great ultrabook,
but at 0.77 inch thick, it's chunky for a tablet, and a bit heavy and unwieldy
to hold in one hand. Like the original Duo 11, it's fingerprint prone, and
outside of a rotating screen hybrid, I'm not sure anyone has come up with a way
to efficiently carry a Windows 8 tablet without either a specially made sleeve
or bag. (Special tablet-handling gloves? Might be a good Kickstarter idea.) A
stylus clip hangs off of the right side for an included active stylus, but if
you're not a stylus person (like me), the whole thing pops right off, giving
you a sleeker silhouette
To Sony's credit, the mechanism
for opening the system and exposing the keyboard and touch pad is much improved
in the new Duo. Lift up with a single finger right behind the center of the
display's top edge, and the spring-loaded hinge goes into action, and two small
metal hooks grab the bottom edges of the display and hold them in place.
Pushing it back down into tablet mode is a little tougher to pull off quickly,
but once you figure out the exact angle and amount of pressure to use, it's
seamless.
At the same time, it
still feels too mechanically complex, and while I didn't have any trouble with
it over the course of several days, I know from past experience that the more
complex a mechanism is, the more things can possibly go wrong with it.
Once open, the
keyboard that you see has large, flat-topped island-style keyboards, a style
Sony used for many years before it became the default industry standard. The
keyboard design and size are great for a 13-inch, but the keys are
extraordinarily shallow. The original had a similar issue, but on the larger
13-inch size, it feels more pronounced, and the shallow keys just don't feel
like they offer enough tactile feedback for long-form typing.
The touch pad is a big improvement over the original
Duo, in that it exists at all. But, it's an unusual shape, basically a long,
shallow rectangle. For basic navigation it works, but I found myself using the
touch screen more than I normally do on a 13-inch touch-enabled ultrabook.
The 13-inch screen
has a 1,920x1,080-pixel native resolution, which is increasingly common in
laptops of all sizes and prices. It's an IPS screen, which means that it looks
good even from side viewing angles -- that's especially important for a tablet.
We're currently running the Vaio Duo 13 through our
benchmark and battery life tests, and will report those results in an upcoming
full review. (source: cnet)
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