5 Minutes With: Sony's VAIO SZ56 notebook

Alongside offering a fairly casual technology news blog, TB Tech offers professional technology advisory, setup and maintenance services to our small business contacts.

We like Sony very much - their VAIO notebooks last and are quite reliable - for us. It came as little surprise then, that when it came to recommending new notebooks for one of our closest business contacts, we chose from within Sony's range of VAIO business laptops.

The 13" lightweight VGN-SZ56 model turned out to be the choice, and today we picked up the five ordered for that contact. Of course, we had to spend five minutes checking it out.

The SZ56 has a premium feel to it - the mixture of brushed aluminium with chrome accents really appeals. The SZ originated Sony's tapering idea - now seen best in the ultralight VAIO TZ series - the notebook starts out fairly thick, and tapers down to a thin front panel. This design gives the notebook a lightweight - and thin - feel.

Speaking of weight, at 1.93kg, the SZ56 certainly isn't heavy, and it's fairly thin by Windows notebook standards anyway.

The full-size keyboard isn't backlit like Apple's MacBook Air, but it is very comfortable to use. The keys are naturally tilted a bit further up from the palmrests because of the notebook tapering - this adds to the ergonomic feel.

We would have preferred the SZ to have a wider touchpad, like the pads found on Apple notebooks - alas, it is a square that, although big enough, offers fairly little room for the fingers.

As the five notebooks have to be set up with our contact's internal servers, we didn't power our photoshoot model up and see how Vista Business ran - however, we're sure that the 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor will be quick.

We'll wait for a report back from our contact on the everyday use of the SZ56 - but our expertise and first impression tells us that it will be a lasting machine for heavy business use.

See: The Sony VAIO SZ56 in pictures