Sony VAIO Pro 13.3" Intel i7 Laptop - Silver

Summary: I'm very happy with this notebook.Pros:Excellent battery lifeBeautiful displayVery, very lightweightDecent keyboardFast/stable wifi (after SW updates)Ports: HDMI, SD, 2x USB 3.0Cons:Sharp pointy bits on the bottom edge of the display panelDisappointing viewing angleUndersized arrow keys and Fn key required for Home/End/PgUp/PgDnLacks ethernet jackTouchpad/case flexing issuesI bought the Sony VAIO Pro SVP13215PXB 13.3-Inch Core i7 Touchscreen Ultrabook (Carbon Black). That's the Core i7 / 8GB RAM / 256GB SSD version and I am very pleased, overall.The notebook resumes from sleep in just a few seconds. If I do a shutdown/power on cycle it's still remarkably fast to boot (less than 10 seconds). I have both hybrid sleep and the fast startup options disabled, and it's still a blazing fast boot.The right edge has an HDMI port, two usb 3.0 ports, headphone/mic jack, and an SD card slot. The left edge has only the jack for the power. There are no I/O ports on the front or back edges. I like this configuration since I don't use the notebook while charging it and therefore I won't have wires (for headphones or whatever else) hanging off more than one edge.The keyboard is better than many others I've tried (I went to a big box store and sampled keyboards on other ultrabooks from Acer, Samsung, Dell, etc.). My only complaint is the trend (from many manufacturers - not just Sony) to shrink the size of the arrow keys and eliminate the Home/End/PgUp/PgDn keys. For document editing these are very important keys. I guess they are just following Apple's lead. Nevertheless, this keyboard is better than the rest, good feel and key travel, nice key spacing, a row of function keys above the numeric keys. A bad keyboard is a deal-breaker for me, and this one meets the bar.I bought the extended sheet battery and it adds some significant extra weight, but I'll accept that for the extended battery life. It's easily removable if I want the really, really light weight. It doesn't attach flush against the bottom panel and actually tips the notebook forward a little bit. This provides a beneficial side effect in that the inexplicable pointy bits on the bottom edge of the display panel won't poke you in the thigh. I use this notebook at home (not all day long) and I can go for days without plugging it in to the charger. I'm convinced that it would last me all day if required. In other words, by today's standards, the battery life is amazing.The display is very, very nice looking. I'm not waiting around for the new super high-resolution Samsung ATIV 9 or the Asus Zenbook Infinity (they are quite tempting); this is such a step up from the 1366x768 garbage we've been fed for so long. The stock Windows 8 configuration is using the 125% text setting and things still look a little small. Windows doesn't layout text and UI components very well when you try to resize above that level, so I'm afraid that a higher resolution display would actually be a problem. Microsoft will need to work on better high DPI display support right away since these high resolution notebooks are now hitting the market.The viewing angle isn't as good as I had hoped - things don't look as bright if you aren't looking straight at the display panel - but it's fine for a single viewer. Don't expect a group of several people to be able to watch a video.The display is glossy (since it's a touchscreen), so keep that in mind if you are in an environment where glare would bother you. I don't really care about the touchscreen feature, but I do try it to use it a bit by sometimes clicking the X to close a window or scroll a webpage or whatever. It works okay and I haven't had a bunch of smeary fingerprints yet, but... meh - what's the big deal about touchscreens, anyway?The display doesn't open extremely wide, roughly 135 degrees (although I didn't really measure). I was initially concerned that it wouldn't work for me if I'm sitting upright and want it tilted way, way back. But it hasn't turned out to be a problem - I've found that it tilts back far enough.There is a little bit of "bloatware", but I've seen worse on other systems, and everything I don't want seems to uninstall without leaving bits behind. It's not enough to complain about.Before I decided to make this purchase, I was concerned about some issues with the laptop that I discovered browsing the Sony forums. These seem to have all been remediated with updates from Sony. There were undoubtedly some initial connectivity/performance issues with the Intel wifi, but I'm running the most recent drivers supplied by Sony and have had no issues with wifi at all. It operates well even when I'm far away from my wifi router - better than the other two notebooks my family uses (both are Asus with an Atheros chipset - and I'm happy with the wifi on my Asus notebooks, too).Initially, the touchpad cursor control was very erratic and would dart around whenever I touched/lifted my finger from the pad, but this was corrected after applying an Synaptics ClickPad software update provided by Sony.If you are a heavy touchpad user, you may not be satisfied. When there is nothing supporting the front edge of the notebook (like when it is resting on your thighs supported by the left and right edges) the touchpad seems to flex inconsistently when you depress the lower left and right corners. There is a nice satisfying click when it works, but the left clicks don't always seem to land - especially in the extreme front left corner of the touchpad. This is so annoying that I just always grab the mouse and use that instead. Since I always prefer the mouse over the touchpad, I am unconcerned, but I think the touchpad is the weakest component in this otherwise excellent product.The default settings enable some "Automatic brightness" and "Display Power Saving Technology" features that are somewhat and extremely annoying, respectively. The first feature senses ambient lighting and brightens/dims the display automatically - it's midly annoying but you can turn it off in the VAIO control center. The second feature is part of the Intel HD graphics software and it almost makes the screen flicker when you close or open a window with a bright background vs. a dark background. I recommend you turn this off in the Intel Graphics properties - it's very distracting. It took me a while to figure out that I had to adjust this in two different places (although I'm sure you can Google for a solution just as I did), but I'm mentioning it here to hopefully save someone some time.Using a bluetooth mouse is irritating because Windows 8 keeps powering down either the "Intel Wireless Bluetooth 4.0 Adapter" and/or the "Generic USB Hub" devices to save power. You can disable this in Device Manager (you need to do it to both devices) but something keeps re-enabling it. I switched to using a wireless USB mouse.