The Motion Eye digital camera and webcam sits above the screen- it's a nice touch, though its limited 640x480 resolution is a bit lacking these days. Its 10.6" screen is nice to look at- it's bright, contrasty, and very high resolution (1280x768). It is one of the best notebook screens I have seen. Its only drawback is its small size making text sometimes difficult and tiring to read. One really nice touch is the magnifying glass button on the side of the screen that automatically changes the screen resolution to 1024x600, making text much more readable. The screen is great, but, because it is glossy, it has more glare than most laptop screens I've seen. Also, although it quite bright, in direct sunlight it's still a bit weak. Using it in the shade on a sunny day, is quite reasonable though. See the images section below for actual images showing the LCD in the sun and in the shade.
The TR2A's 1.0 Ghz Intel Centrino processor is fast enough for typical office work and fast enough for playing DVDs flawlessly. DVD videos look great on the system! The TR2A comes with an Intel 855GM chipset with integrated Intel Extreme Graphics 2 video which is good enough for most office tasks and for most games as long as they are not too demanding. True gamers looking for top 3D gaming performance will not be happy with this machine.
The speakers sit on top of the display and sound ok though not great, but then, they are pretty small. They tend to sound a bit too tinny, and lack bass and depth. When the system is not playing sound, it is pleasantly quiet- you can barely hear the CPU fan, and the hard drive is also very quiet.
The keyboard is actually moderately usable despite the extreme flatness and small size (17mm pitch). The keys are easy to type on, and I find that I am able to type ok, but slightly slower than on a full-sized keyboard. Probably the most annoying thing about the keyboard is the lack of separate PageUp and PageDown keys they could have at least added them as buttons along the side of the screen. The touchpad works well (though I prefer a TrackPoint) and is responsive. It also has a nice feature in that running your finger down the right edge causes it to act like a scroll wheel on a mouse. See the images section below for a closeup of the keyboard.
The ports available on the TR2A are good enough- two USB 2.0 ports, an unpowered FireWire port, a modem jack, a 10/100 ethernet jack, a VGA port, one PCMCIA slot, and a headphone and microphone jack. There's also a Memory Stick Pro port, though it would have been more useful if Sony would just give up on that and adopt one of the other standard flash memory formats.
I had a lot of trouble getting the 802.11b wireless networking to work properly- every time I started using it, it would work for a few minutes and then would no longer work. I eventually found that upgrading my LinkSys wireless base station's firmware seemed to solve the problem.
Over the first week that I have used my TR2A, it has had probems coming out of suspend or hibernate mode three times. I had to unplug the unit and pull the battery out in order to restart it again.
Battery life is nowhere near the 7 hours advertised. I find that I typically get around 3 to 3.5 hours of real battery life using the Sony TR2A actively. This usually means playing a CD, while doing editing, emails, and web browsing.
My system did not come with Adobe Photoshop Elements, despite the fact that Sony's spec page says it comes with the system. I tried emailing and calling Sony Support to fix this problem and they kept giving me the runaround- Sony's service is quite bad, and they were unable to resolve this issue.
I find that even with its fairly fast CPU, some DVDs still have parts that stutter when they play. Overall it's not a major issue, but I thought I'd point that out.
Also, the more I use them, (over 3 months now) the more I hate the keyboard and touchpad. They aren't very ergonomically designed- a compromise for the small space and light weight.
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