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April 15, 2016

HP ProBook 4411 Battery

Mounted below the front lip, the Vaio Z Flip's speakers are a mixed bag, producing an interesting separation of sound, but quite a bit of distortion. When I played the disco classic "Car Wash," the vocals and music sounded like they were coming out of different sides of the deck, but high tones like drums were tinny. Listening to a series of guitar-heavy songs, including "Holy Diver," I heard the speakers buzz unpleasantly during the highest-pitched riffs. The sound was loud enough to fill a small living room at maximum volume, but noticeably muffled when I put the device flat on my lap.

The Vaio Z Flip's stiff, shallow keyboard makes for an uncomfortable typing experience, which feels a lot like pressing your fingers into a rock. The keys are well-sized and well-located, but have just 1.1mm of vertical travel, far below the 1.5mm to 2mm we like to see. However, laptops such as the 12-inch MacBook Air manage to provide pleasant, snappy tactile feedback in spite of their short travel by offering some resistance. Unfortunately, the Vaio Z's keys require only 50 grams of force to actuate (55 to 60 g is typical) which means touch typists will find themselves "bottoming out" or hitting the keyboard base with a lot of force.

When I performed the 10 Fast Fingers typing test on the Vaio Z Filp, I had a whopping 10 percent error rate and reached a speed of just 82 words per minute, whereas my typical scores are 95 wpm and 1 to 2 percent. Because of the weak feedback, I found myself missing a lot of letters and, worse, my fingers felt a bit sore from bottoming out so much.

The 4.2 x 2.6-inch touchpad is comfortable but suffered from accuracy issues in our testing. The first review unit we received had an extremely jumpy pad; as I moved across the screen, the cursor would sometimes teleport itself several pixels ahead of where I was moving. Vaio then sent us a second model on which the pad wasn't jumpy but was occasionally sticky. It stopped the pointer for a second or two when we were drawing figure eights in Paint or navigating across the desktop.
Unlike with many touchpads, on both units the cursor was stable when I double-clicked. The Vaio Z responded immediately and consistently to multitouch gestures, such as pinch-to-zoom and three-finger-swipe (to minimize windows). The pad's matte-mica texture also felt pleasant against my finger, offering just enough traction without feeling rough.

The Vaio Z Flip's included active stylus was extremely comfortable to hold and accurate to use. With a rollerball-like tip, metal clip and pleasant rubber finger grip, it looks and feels just like a real pen. The glossy screen did feel a bit slippery when we were writing on it; by contrast, the Surface Pro 4 pen provides friction (and customizable tips), which makes it feel more like you're scribbling on paper.

Artists and other creative professionals will appreciate how smoothly you can draw lines and shapes with the pen, an experience I had when using both OneNote and Windows Paint. I particularly enjoyed editing a WordPad document by scribbling words into Windows 10's built-in OCR keyboard. Because of the pen's accurate performance, my on-screen handwriting looked as good as it does on paper, allowing the operating system to convert most of my scribbles into the correct ASCII words.
With support for 1,024 levels of pressure, the stylus created thicker or thinner lines in OneNote, depending on how hard we pushed the pen against the screen. Vaio says that the Z Flip's screen is designed to minimize parallax, the difference between where you place the pen tip and where the lines appear. In our testing, dots appeared right where we drew them.

The top surface of the Vaio Z Flip stayed relatively cool throughout our tests, but the bottom got a little warm. After we streamed a video for 15 minutes, the bottom surface measured 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the keyboard clocked in at 94 degrees and the touchpad was a chilly 77 degrees. We consider temperatures above 95 degrees to be uncomfortable.
The 0.66-inch thick Vaio Z Flip doesn't have space for a lot of ports, but it packs in a few essential connectors. The right side houses two USB ports, one of which can charge devices when the laptop is asleep, while the left side contains an HDMI port, a 3.5mm audio jack and an SD card reader.

Like most laptop webcams, the Vaio Z Flip's front 0.92-megapixel lens shoots mediocre photos. When I took pictures of my face, under both the fluorescent lights of our office and the LED lamps in my living room, the picture was bright but grainy and washed out.

However, the 8-MP rear camera, which strangely sits on the bottom of the laptop, delivered really strong lowlight images. When I took a photo of a dark area in my living room at night, the image was significantly brighter than real life, with only a modest amount of noise.

While most higher-performance 2-in-1s or laptops use 15-watt versions of Intel's Core i5 or Core i7 processors, the Vaio Z Flip packs a 28-watt Intel 6th Generation Core Series chip that delivers more computing power. Our review configuration of the Vaio offered plenty of pop with its 2.9-GHz Intel 6th Generation Core i5-6267U CPU, Intel Iris Graphics 540 GPU, 8GB of RAM and speedy 256GB PCIe SSD. Even when I had over a dozen tabs open and a 4K video playing in another window, the laptop's performance was buttery smooth. Just don't expect to game on this notebook or do graphics-intensive work.
On Geekbench 3, a synthetic benchmark that measures overall performance, the Vaio Z Flip scored a strong 7,235, way ahead of the ultraportable laptop category average (4,774) and noticeably quicker than the Core i7-6500U-powered Lenovo Yoga 900 (6,264), Core m7-6Y75-enabled HP Spectre X2, and Core i5-6300U-powered versions of the Surface Pro 4 (6,811) and Surface Book (6,814). The Apple MacBook Pro, which also uses a 28-watt process -- a Core i5-5257U -- returned a similar mark, of 7,113.

The Z Flip's PCIe SSD took just 13 seconds to complete our Laptop File Transfer test, which involves copying 4.97GB of mixed-media files. That's a rate of 391.5 MBps, more than double the 163.5-MBps category average and much quicker than all of the Flip's competitors, except the MacBook Pro (386 MBps), which was only 5 MBps behind.

Because of the device's high-wattage processor, we weren't surprised to see the Vaio Z Flip do really well on our spreadsheet test, which involves matching 20,000 names with their addresses in OpenOffice Calc. Vaio's laptop finished the task in just 3 minutes and 47 seconds, more than twice as fast as the category average (7:53) and around half a minute faster than the Yoga 900 (4:1 , Surface Pro 4 (4:11) and Surface Book (4:17). The MacBook Pro was just a little faster (3:2 .

The Vaio Z Flip comes in three configurations: The $1,799 base model, which we reviewed here, comes with a 2.9-GHz Core i5-6267U processor, a 256GB SSD, Windows 10 Home and 8GB of RAM. A $1,999 model upgrades to a 3.3-GHz Core i7-6567U CPU and Windows 10 Pro. The $2,399 top config has the Core i7-6567U CPU but jumps to 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD.

Vaio Z Flip vs. the Competition
For $1,199, the Lenovo Yoga 900 offers a sharper screen than the Vaio Z Flip, a much better keyboard and a bit lighter chassis. However, the Yoga lacks stylus support, and the 2-in-1 isn't quite as powerful or long-lasting.
For $1,699, or $100 less than the Z Flip, you can get a Surface Book with a Core i5 CPU and a 256GB SSD. That system has a better pen and sharper screen, and lasts 12.5 hours on a charge. If you don't need a 2-in-1, the MacBook Pro 13-inch provides similar performance to the Z Flip but with a much better keyboard, a sharper screen, the best touchpad in the business and 12 hours of battery life.

Bottom Line
The Vaio Z Flip is definitely a head-turning 2-in-1, with its gorgeous, flipping display and sleek design, and the fast performance and long battery life help justify the steep price tag. The pen also works well, even though there's nowhere to put it when it's not in use. However, we found the keyboard uncomfortable, and the issues we had with touchpads on two different review units leave us concerned about the experience users will have.

A typical, old-generation laptop consumes about 25 watts, but the power consumption of the Yoga 900 can apparently be brought down to around 8.5 watts by turning off the WiFi and reducing the display brightness to indoor use levels. As a result, battery life is up to 9 hours (66 divided by 8.5).

Normal usage (15 watts) will reduce the battery life to around five-and-a-half hours.The Yoga is so called because of its hinge, which allows the display to be bent all the way backward to put the laptop into a (heavy) â€˜tablet modeâ€™. Of course, you canâ€™t really use it like a tablet because the total weight of the device is 1.3 kg, while tablets typically weigh around 0.5 kg.

The biggest drawback for the Y-900 is the price. The same model sells for $1,300 (Rs 86,500) in the US.The device is clearly unaffordable for 99% of the population. However, letâ€™s hope other manufacturers take a hint from the launch and bring in more and more laptops with retina-level displays.ã€€Fujitsu Ltd. said Thursday it will voluntarily recall and provide replacements for about 70,000 battery packs used in some of its Lifebook laptop computer models as they could catch fire.The company has so far confirmed three cases of fire linked to the battery, manufactured by Panasonic Corp., but said there have been no reports of injuries.

The battery packs are used in some of the laptop models sold in Japan between 2011 and 2012 and those sold overseas in 2012, it said.Product numbers and serial numbers of those subjected to the latest recall are posted on Fujitsuâ€™s website.It has been over a year since Sony sold off its Vaio brand due to decreased laptop sales, but now it seems that the brand may be making a comeback in the form of a mobile device. The Vaio Phone Biz will be the companyâ€™s first smartphone and, surprisingly, it is running Windows 10 Mobile.

Vaio is trying to retain the design and build quality of Sonyâ€™s laptops by using high quality materials in its new handset. The Vaio Phone Biz features a very sleek aluminum build with a silver finish. Not only has the new phone been designed well, but the company has also put the device through extensive testing to ensure its quality and that it will withstand daily wear and tear.

The Vaio Phone Biz will have a 5.5-inch 1080p LCD screen that will hopefully save battery life while giving users plenty of screen real estate. It has a 13 megapixel camera on the back and houses 3GB of RAM along with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 processor.

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