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Sony Vaio Flip 13 review

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S Aadeetya
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Sony recently sold off its Vaio laptop division after facing financial issues for long time. With this announcement, the Japanese company has made sure that no more Vaio laptops are manufactured and sold across globe. This is why Sony Vaio Flip carries a special sentiment for us. Launched in the high-end market for travel workers, Flip comes in three different options; 13.3 inch, 14 inch and 15 inch priced starting from Rs 94,900.

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Design and Performance

In terms of design, Sony's Vaio products have bordered around being immaculate and mediocre and with Vaio Flip 13, the company has taken its shade under the former which makes it a well-designed, premium looking notebook wrapped under brushed aluminium finish, making it sturdy as well. That said, we would like to highlight the fragile nature of Flip with its hard parts on the front which opened up without putting much stress while handling.

Flip is a slim 13 inch form factor notebook that makes it easy to carry with its lightweight nature and multi-purpose mode wherein you can use it like a notebook or just a Windows 8 tablet with sole purpose of using the display, facilitated by the hinge on the centre of the display.

The full HD display, a refreshing change from the usual HD (1366x768 pixels) display offer crisp viewing ably supported by high-level brightness, which tends to modulate on its own for some reasons. The back-lit keyboard offers good typing experience and finger movement poses no issues.

In terms of connectivity, the laptop offers only 2 USB ports on the right), 1 HDMI port, SD card slot but no Ethernet port (no LAN) which might be a deal breaker for some and volume rocker buttons are placed at bottom right, when using the tablet mode. The hinge that works the magic of dual-purpose of Flip 13 is ergonomically not its best and looks rather delicate for such a high-priced device. For storage, the company expects you to use external drives and USB drive which justifies the point of adding 128 GB SSD on the notebook.

Powered by Intel Core i5 CPU with 4 GB RAM, the laptop can be credited with delivering decent performance even while multi-tasking but not anything extraordinary that one expects for its steep pricing. Another interesting aspect that we figured was about the rear camera placed on the back panel which gets hidden when used like a notebook but more usable when Flip's tablet form is opted. Performance wise, Vaio Flip 13 scored well on display, graphics and utility functions. This when compared with less priced Acer R7 and HP Elitebook Revolve are much better. In terms of battery life, Flip 13 lasted our rigorous tests (heavy multi-tasking on full brightness Wi-Fi) for more than 8 hours which is leap and bounds better than the Revolve and R7.

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