Sony Announces VAIO Z Series 13.1-inch Notebook w/ Thunderbolt

The new super-slim VAIO Z Series notebook was announced yesterday and after checking this new series out we must say that it has a lot going for it. The hybrid carbon fiber housing looks amazing and the entire notebook weighs just 2.65 pounds or 1.2 kilos for our friends overseas. Not bad for a 13.1″ notebook that has a 2nd generation Intel Core i7 Sandy Bridge processor and 3rd generation SSD RAID w/ TRIM support for blazing operation. It is also impressive that Sony got up to 7 hours of battery life out of the machine as well since the notebook uses a very unconventional battery. If you want a notebook to travel with and want one that looks unique the VAIO Z Series from Sony might be the right platform for you!

Due to the thin design of this PC it won’t have discrete graphics inside, but you can purchase something called the Sony Power Media Dock if you do. The Power Media Dock contains an AMD Radeon HD 6650M discrete graphics card with 1GB DDR3, which takes over the graphical duties from the integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000 inside the processor. The discrete GPU can an additional three external displays with a maximum resolution of 1920×1200 through VGA and HDMI outputs.

The image above might look like just an external optical drive, but looks can be deceiving.

Looking at the back of the Power Media Dock you can get a better idea of what is going on and why the device uses the Thunderbolt (developed by Intel under the code name Light Peak) for the high-speed I/O data transfer interface architecture.