Sony Vaio Duo 13 - Major Improvement For The Windows 8 Slider (Part 2)

Screen and sound

The VAIO Duo 13 takes the 1,080p IPS touchscreen of the Duo 11 and improves it with Sony’s Triluminos technology, which was first released in Bravia TV series and is also in the VAIO Pro lineup that has just been announced. The screen is as bright as you would expect, and the viewing angles are wide. Although you are unable to adjust the screen position of the slider, you will not have any problems when viewing images on the screen from the left or right of center. The capacitive touchscreen also recognized all our input perfectly, which is especially significant when using the device in tablet mode. Whereas we obviously love this screen, it should be noted that the latest series of Windows 8 devices consists of products with much higher 2,560 x 1,440 pixel resolutions.

The VAIO Duo 13 takes the 1,080p IPS touchscreen of the Duo 11 and improves it with Sony’s Triluminos technology, which was first released in Bravia TV series and is also in the VAIO Pro lineup that has just been announced. The screen is as bright as you would expect, and the viewing angles are wide.

You will like quite clear sound on the Duo 13, especially considering that the speakers are attached on the bottom. Of course, that does not mean that music and dialogue sound are incredibly rich, but the sound is loud enough, and of course it is fairly good for watching movies or listening to music in a medium-sized room.

Performance and battery life

Sony VAIO Duo 13 (1.6GHz Core i5-4,200U, Intel HD 4,400)

·         PCMark7: 4,440                          

·         3DMark06: 6,047 

·         3DMark11: E1,853 / P975 / X297           

·         ATTO (top disk speeds):  546 MB/s (reads); 139 MB/s (writes)

Sony VAIO Duo 13

Sony VAIO Duo 11 (1.7GHz Core i7-3317U, Intel HD 4,000)

·         PCMark7: 4,545                          

·         3DMark06: 4,807 

·         3DMark11: E1,107 / P621 / X201           

·         ATTO (top disk speeds): 540 MB/s (reads); 525 MB/s (writes)

Sony VAIO Duo 11(1.7GHz Core i7-3317U, Intel HD 4,000)

Sony VAIO Pro 11 (1.8GHz Core i7-4,500U, Intel HD 4,400)

·         PCMark7: 4,634              

·         3DMark06: N/A    

·         3DMark11: E1,067 / P600 / X183           

·         ATTO (top disk speeds): 558 MB/s (reads); 255 MB/s (writes)

Sony VAIO Pro 11 (1.8GHz Core i7-4,500U, Intel HD 4,400)

Samsung ATIV Book 7 (1.8GHz Core i5-3,337U, Intel HD 4,000)

·         PCMark7: 4,418  

·         3DMark06: 4,045 

·         3DMark11: E1,081 / P600           

·         ATTO (top disk speeds): 626 MB/s (reads); 137 MB/s (writes)

Samsung ATIV Book 7

ASUS Transformer Book (1.9GHz Core i7-3,517U, Intel HD 4,000)

·         PCMark7: 4,414  

·         3DMark06: 3,840 

·         3DMark11: E924 / P512 / X177  

·         ATTO (top disk speeds): 482 MB/s (reads); 317 MB/s (writes)

ASUS Transformer Book

Toshiba Kirabook (2.0GHz Core i7-3,537U, Intel HD 4,000)

·         PCMark7: 5,275  

·         3DMark06: 5,272 

·         3DMark11: N/A    

·         ATTO (top disk speeds): 553 MB/s (reads); 500 MB/s (writes)

Toshiba Kirabook

Acer Aspire S7 (1.9GHz Core i7-3,517U, Intel HD 4,000)

·         PCMark7: 5,011  

·         3DMark06: 4,918 

·         3DMark11: E1,035 / P620 / X208           

·         ATTO (top disk speeds): 934 MB/s (reads); 686 MB/s (writes)

Acer Aspire S7

MSI Slidebook S20 (1.8GHz Core i5-3,337U, Intel HD 4,000)

·         PCMark7: 4,043  

·         3DMark06: 3,944 

·         3DMark11: E1,053 / P578           

·         ATTO (top disk speeds): 484 MB/s (reads); 286 MB/s (writes)

MSI Slidebook S20

Asus Taichi 21 (1.9GHz Core i7-3,517U, Intel HD 4,000)

·         PCMark7: 4,998  

·         3DMark06: 4,818 

·         3DMark11: E1,137 / P610 / X201           

·         ATTO (top disk speeds): 516 MB/s (reads); 431 MB/s (writes)

Asus Taichi 21

Microsoft Surface Pro (1.7GHz Core i5-3,317U, Intel HD 4,000)

·         PCMark7: 4,673  

·         3DMark06: 3,811 

·         3DMark11: E1,019 / P552           

·         ATTO (top disk speeds): 526 MB/s (reads); 201 MB/s (writes)

Microsoft Surface Pro

Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13 (1.7GHz Core i5-3,317U, Intel HD 4,000)

·         PCMark7: 4,422  

·         3DMark06: 4,415 

·         3DMark11: E917 / P572  

·         ATTO (top disk speeds): 278 MB/s (reads); 263 MB/s (writes)

Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13

Dell XPS 12 (1.7GHz Core i5-3,317U, Intel HD 4,000)

·         PCMark7: 4,673  

·         3DMark06: 4,520 

·         3DMark11: N/A    

·         ATTO (top disk speeds): 516 MB/s (reads); 263 MB/s (writes)

Dell XPS 12

Usually, in this review we will compare the Ultrabooks that have the equivalent specifications each other and as you may know, the playing field is more or less equal for these computers. But we are now entering an unexplored field, since the VAIO Duo 13 runs Intel's new fourth-generation Haswell processor. More particularly, this guy runs a dual-core Core i5-4,200U CPU clocked at 1.6GHz (with turbo boost up to 2.6GHz). When testing this machine in the normal application suite of tests, we found a significant improvement compared with the Duo 11 and its Core i5-3,317U chip.

This acceleration was most visible in the graphics tests, such as 3DMark06, where the Duo 13 reached 6,047 scores compared to 4,807 scores of its predecessor. That figure even surpassed the numbers of more flagship Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks, such as the Acer Aspire S7, which reached 4,918 scores. The overall performance tests such as PCMark7 showed a less significant acceleration - in fact, the Duo 13 scored slightly less than the 11. And on the ATTO drive test, Sony’s new slider had a bit of faster read speeds (546MB/s compared to 540MB/s for the Duo 11), and curiously, the write speeds had much lower rate (138MB/s versus 525MB/s). We also examined the VAIO Pro 11, and its Core i7-4,500U chip showed a slight improvement compared with Intel’s third-generation processors.

While these numbers are interesting, we are at the dawn of the Haswell era, and we will need to test a few more devices before giving out definitive conclusions about the performance boost. However, this time we liked what we saw. One of our biggest performance complaints about the Duo 11 was unacceptably slow accelerometer. Fortunately, that problem did not take into the Duo 13. Here, the screen switches direction in only a second or two, as it should do. The cold- boot into Windows 8 only takes six to seven seconds, and the Duo 13 generally ran very smoothly during our testing. We only had two cases of application crashes, and they might be related to not-final firmware.

While the original Duo only lasted 4 hours and 47 minutes our battery benchmark, Sony says that the Duo 13 will last 10 hours. This amount of time is achieved by adding a much larger battery - the company says it's the equivalent with the Duo 11’s normal battery plus its optional attached battery. When we ran our battery test (playing a video continuously with screen brightness set to 65% and Wi-Fi on), the device achieved an impressive 9 hours and 40 minutes, longer than the average of current Ultrabook.