Sony Vaio CA is a laptop for home, a laptop that gets noticed through a happy and colorful design.

A laptop targeting young clients, nonconformist and willing to bring a plus of color in your day to day life, the Sony Vaio CA series tries to combined competitive performances with a expressive design, a design out of the business portable patterns.

Sony Vaio CA is that kind of product that you love as soon as you see it, or you will hate it forever because it does not match your personality.

From a construction point of view, Sony Vaio CA is a 14 inch portable with a reasonable weight, housed in a solid and well designed case, with a design that has many shiny surfaces.

The back of the screen and the inferior side of the case, except the keyboard, are covered in translucent plastic. The material has the property of reflecting and amplifying ambient light, giving the impression that the entire surface is illuminated underneath. The illumination effect is even more obvious in the touchpad area.

The 14 inch screen supports the 1366 x 768 pixels resolution and it is framed in a narrow frame. The luminosity of the miage is preetty high to not be bothered with the glossy design, and the good reproduction of colors assures a good experience when viewing movies.

The chiclet keyboard is easy to use and pretty silent, and for a plus of comfort when using during the night we have a source of LED light. For a better battery management, the illumination feature is activated with the help of a proximity sensor that activates only when our palms are on the keyboard.

The touchpad is covered with a textured plastic which provides a good feeling. The sensibility is very good and the working surface is big enough to cover the entire screen in one try. The two left/right click buttons are easy to press but they are a bit loud.

Sound is rendered with the help of a set of stereo speakers positioned above the keyboard. Unfortunately the quality is disappointing.

The Li-Ion battery is integrated in the body of the case, but can be easily removed when you need it. The design of the Sony Vaio CA case allows fast access to the hard drive and RAM memory.

Connectivity

In the front side of the restpad we have three LED lights activated for Power, Battery and HDD along with the memory card slot and a switch for activating/disabling the network interfaces.

In the right side we can also find the optical drive, connectors for headset and microphone, and two USB 2.0 ports. In the left we find a USB 2.0 port and a USB 3.0 one, along with the HDMI and VGA outputs. On the left side we also have the LAN connector and the AC one, along with the vent of the cooling system.

Sony Vaio CA Technical Specifications

• Model – VAIO VPCCA1S1E
• Screen - 14.0 inch (resolution 1366 x 768 pixeli, glossy design)
• Processor - Intel Core i3-2310M (2.1 GHz, 3 MB Cache L3, TDP 35W, 32nm)
• Dedicated Graphics  – AMD Radeon HD 6470M (512 MB/64 bit DDR 3 dedicated memory, DirectX 11 compatible)
• RAM Memory- 4 GB DDR3-1333 (Max. 8GB)
• Hard disk – 500 GB (5400 RPM)
• Optical Drive – DVD±RW/±R DL/RAM
• Network - WLAN 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, Gigabit LAN
• Connectors - 3x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.0, VGA, HDMI, căşti, microfon
• Accessories - card reader (SD/ MS/ MS Pro/ MMC), HD web camera powered by “Exmor”, illuminated keyboard
• Operating System – Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
• Battery - 6 cells (5300 mAh, 59 Wh)
• Weight - 2.45 Kg

Performances

Sony Vaio CA managed to get 5294 points in the PCMark Vintage test, a good result for the used hardware configuration but a bit under other laptops based on the Sandy Bridge Platform.

Despite the 512 MB of dedicated video memory, the AMD Radeon HD 6470 graphic solution has a hard time in current games, managing to get only 18 frames per second in Battlefield 3. The laptop got better results in DiRT 3.

Autonomy

Helped by a Li-Ion 6 cells battery, Sony Vaio CA manages to work for 3 hours and 15 minutes, if playing a 720p resolution movie.

If we opt to do office type activities like browsing the internet, Sony Vaio CA allows a autonomy of more than 4 hours.

Pluses and Minuses

+ solid case, good quality materials

+ state of the art hardware platform based on Intel Sandy Bridge

+ illuminated keyboard and quality trackpad

+ internal optical drive

- shiny screen

- bad audio quality

- colorful design is not liked by everybody

Rating: 4.0