Sony VAIO M11 review
Sony's reason for steering clear of netbooks in the early days was that its products just didn't fit the cheap and cheerful template. Instead, Sony aimed to keep its premium prices and try something different, but the quite baffling P-Series pocket laptop didn't exactly make waves. Neither did the company's first true netbook, the Sony VAIO Mini W Series, which came with an unrealistic £340 exc VAT price tag.
Disappointing
Now, at last, we have the netbook Sony should have made a year ago: the VAIO M11. Its £254 price fits in with the most popular netbooks around today, and it shares all the usual specifications, but if you're expecting Sony's design and class to scale down to this low level you'll be disappointed. When we say it's the netbook Sony should have made a year ago, we really mean it: it looks and feels like a year-old piece of kit.
The black plastic chassis has no real heft to it, and comes with none of the standard VAIO touches to differentiate it. Sony's Scrabble-tile keyboard is left out in favour of a standard netbook design, with woolly key travel and a layout and finish that could have come from any number of rivals. The touchpad is tiny and had erratic moments during our testing, although the buttons were responsive.
The lid is stronger than it looks and protects the display well, but the screen beneath it is uninspiring. It has a matte finish that adds a little grain, and although colours are fairly accurate there's no real punch to images. It's fine when you're typing documents or browsing the web, which is what most netbooks are used for, but we've seen much better.
Around the edges of the chassis sit three USB ports, an SD and MMC card reader and a Gigabit Ethernet port, while a D-SUB output sits on the left side for hooking up an external display. There's an 802.11bgn wireless adapter, with a corresponding wireless slider switch on the front edge, and Sony has also decided to use that sliding design for the power switch: it's unnecessarily fiddly.
