Sony Vaio Fit 11a Flip review: Hands-on at CES 2014
What is the Sony Vaio Fit 11a Flip?
The Sony Vaio Fit 11a is an 11-inch laptop with a clever
second screen hinge that lets you flip the screen around, turning the keyboard
base into a stand for the display – perfect for watching films or showing
someone else what's on-screen. You can also close the laptop with the screen on
the outside, turning it into a chunky tablet. To give it more tablet cred, the
Fit 11a also has an active digitiser pen. It's a smaller version of the other
Fit laptops Sony released last year.
Sony Vaio Fit 11a – Design and Features
The Sony Vaio Fit 11a is a curious mix of things. It's a
Ultrabook-ish laptop, it's sort-of a tablet, and it has elements of a graphics
tablet too.
It's more than a normal laptop because of two things – the
Active pen and the second hinge that sits halfway up the laptop lid. The latter
earns the Vaio Fit 11a the title 'flip' computer, because the screen literally
flips over, back onto the outside of the laptop lid.
To some this may seem less useful than a full hybrid,
because when in its tablet-like form it's very thick for tablet. It's arguably
a bit thick to be called an Ultrabook too, although doubtless some will call it
one. It weighs 1.27kg, which is light enough to carry around without shoulder
ache, if not particularly notable given the screen size.
It's a nicely-built laptop, though, which is a necessary
reassurance when the secondary hinge is an obvious point at which the Vaio Fit
11a may fail. It doesn't feel immensely strong but Sony says it has tested the
hinge with 20,000 cycles of movement – which we can't really argue with.
The lid is made of metal, but the inner part of it is
plastic. It's understandable as this is not an exceedingly expensive laptop. We
don't have UK prices, but the Fit 11a starts from $799 in the US – so it'll
sell for well under £1000 here.
It's also not a super-powerful PC, though, using a quad-core
Pentium N3520 processor rather than the speedier Intel Core type. You get 128GB
of storage and 8GB of RAM, although the spec may change slightly when it hits
our shores.
Sony Vaio Fit 11a Flip – Screen and Pen
The Sony Vaio Fit
