Digital Trends

Sony VAIO C1MW PictureBook March 11th, 2003 | by Benj Mauck

Features Continued

Extended battery life is the biggest boast of the Transmeta Crusoe CPU inside this Sony Picturebook.  Unfortunately it is also one of the more difficult to benchmark, as this CPU does voltage and frequency scaling on the fly to limit power consumption according to need.  A clear comparison can be made only with a standard load, such as DVD playback.  Starting with a full battery we were able to make it to just before Wesley, Fezzik and Inigo Montoya storm the castle in The Princess Bride.  That is exactly 75 minutes: maybe long enough for some of those new fangled movies like MIB II, but not long enough for a true classic.  Obviously the included external CD-W/DVD draws a large portion of the power, and drastically reduces the battery life.  For more common sporadic usage (including benchmarking, video capture, and idle time) we were able to demonstrate an average battery life of between two and three hours.  This is comparable to many notebook computers — despite some claims of the CPU manufacture otherwise.  Of course, a larger battery is available if your main concern is finishing your movie on the airplane.

Several other features are notable.  There is one type II card slot — which would be perfect for an 802.11b wireless card.  Built in stereo speakers provide adequate volume.  The audio quality during DVD playback was good — as we would expect from Sony.  The high resolution (1280x600) screen is excellent for watching wide screen DVD's, although we had to play around with the settings for a while to get the widescreen DVD to fill up the entire width and height.  Unfortunately this size is not so convenient for office style applications — where viewing full pages is preferable.  In such cases it would probably be a nice feature if the monitor could rotate 90°.  Games and graphics also suffer due to the limited height.  Fortunately a port replicator is included to allow simple docking and connection to a full size monitor.  The data transfer abilities via memory stick, ILINK (IEEE 1394), and AV in/out allows quick & easy access to many nice toys: camcorders, cameras, and gadgets.  Of course modem and Ethernet are also included to talk to big brother - the PC.

Setup and Installation

As expected no unusual setup or installation is necessary.  Windows XP Professional is installed, as is Corel WordPerfect Office 2002.  Boot time was one minute thirty seconds — perhaps a bit on the slow side when compared to other laptops, and even slower if compared to PDAs.  Ample documentation is provided — but none is necessary to start playing.  One push of a button pulls up the video capture program, momentarily turning the monitor into a mirror.