Sony VAIO VGN-S360

You could try to find a thin-and-light notebook that delivers as much multimedia performance and good looks as the Sony VAIO VGN-S360, but you'd fail miserably. Weighing a mere 4.2 pounds, this elegant black and silver system boasts a bright 13.3-inch widescreen, powerful ATI graphics, and very good battery life. At $1,799, you pay a bit of a premium for Sony's eye-catching design, but you'll stop caring as soon as you unpack this little beauty from the box.

With its matte black finish and shiny VAIO logo on the outside, the sturdy S360 makes almost as good an impression closed as it does open. We noticed the lid picked up smudges pretty quickly, however, so it might have been wise for Sony to include a polishing cloth. Things look even better on the inside, starting with the 13.3-inch display that uses Sony's XBrite technology. There is a bit of a glare when you're working in Word or checking e-mail, but that's more than made up for with great contrast and rich colors during DVD playback and while playing games.

That's right, games. Unlike most other systems in this weight class, Sony somehow shoehorned ATI's Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics chipset into this system. The result is surprisingly fluid gameplay during a marathon session of Half-Life 2. At a resolution of 800 x 600, the S360 sprinted along at a very respectable 46 frames per second, compared to 10 fps or less for notebooks with integrated graphics. 3DMark backed up our hands-on impression with a very good score of 8,105.

When it's time to get some work done, you'll appreciate the fast but efficient 1.7-GHz Pentium M inside the S360, along with the 512MB of RAM and sluggish but huge 80GB hard drive. Applications popped up in a second, and the notebook plowed through most productivity chores, garnering a slightly better than average MobileMark score of 184.

One of the reasons we're a fan of the S series is that it's one of the few sub-five-pound notebooks to sport a full-sized keyboard. It also features a short but wide trackpad and two slightly raised silver mouse buttons that we wish were slightly larger.

The port complement on this system is pretty sparse. You'll find a VGA port on the left, along with the mic and headphone jack, and on the right there are three USB 2.0 ports and a FireWire port behind a flip-down door. As usual, Sony supports only its own Memory Stick slot up front. Other manufacturers have been offering multi-card readers that handle Memory Stick and other formats for well over a year, and we have to reprimand Sony for not offering the same flexibility. A 5-in-1 Memory Card adapter is available from Sony for $39.

The S360 delivers enough battery life to get you through a good chunk of your workday (or about two DVDs). With all of the power-saving settings turned off, it lasted 3 hours and 42 minutes. Turning the Wi-Fi switch on resulted in a runtime only two minutes shorter. However, we wish that switch was a bit tighter; it wobbled a bit in our tests.

We watched a few DVD episodes of Arrested Development on the S360 and were quite impressed with the smooth video quality. The speakers get plenty loud, too. We cranked up "American Idiot" by Green Day in Windows Media Player and it delivered more than enough volume to fill a small bedroom or hotel room. If you're on the road a lot, you can leave those portable speakers at home.

As with most other VAIO notebooks, Sony loads the S360 with plenty of multimedia software, including VAIO Zone with WinDVD, PictureGear Studio (photo), SonicStage (music), VAIO Media (network file sharing), and DVgate Plus (digital video). Unfortunately, you can't do much with the movies you edit unless you spring for an external burner. Sony's made-to-order model, the S380, offers a DVD burner for an extra $150.

Other preloaded software includes Quicken 2005 New User Edition, Microsoft Works 8.0 (with word processing, spreadsheet, and calendar), Norton Internet Security (with 90-day trial subscription), and SpySubtract (with 30-day trial subscription).

If you could care less about graphics horsepower, there are plenty of other notebooks that weigh the same as this one providing the same productivity performance and endurance for hundreds less. If you want one system for work and play, and if you crave a head-turning design, there's no substitute for the Sony VAIO S360.