Sony Vaio T350P Review

Surfin' USA

Sitting at Starbucks gets expensive. Taking your laptop to lounge by the hotel pool, only to learn that you must stay in your room, is a pain. In short, the WiFi wireless e-mail and Internet access that seemed so wonderful just a year or two ago now gets taken for granted -- and grumbled about whenever we're out of range of a hotspot or unable to make a connection.

Sony Electronics has taken a big step toward a solution: The Vaio T350P's doubled data transmission lets you use e-mail or a Web browser anywhere you can use a Cingular cell phone.

To quote the acronyms next to indicator lights on its front edge, the mini-notebook can switch between WLAN -- an 802.11b/g wireless local area network -- and WWAN -- Cingular's EDGE wireless wide area network, a slower-than-WiFi-but-usually-faster-than-dial-up data link priced at $80 a month for unlimited use. (Infrequent users can pay $50 monthly with a 50MB ceiling.) The Vaio also swaps data with Bluetooth devices, completing a wireless hat trick.

It's not cheap -- our test unit goes for $2,200 plus wireless fees -- and the EDGE network, like other cellular services, doesn't reach every spot in the U.S., let alone the world. But the 3.1-pound T350P firmly follows Sony's tradition of elegantly engineered status-symbol laptops. Besides, Cingular gives you a month free with a one-year contract.

Dialing for Data

Like Cingular's wireless phones, the T350P gets its carrier access from and keeps your account info in a tiny SIM card inserted beneath its battery pack. Sony advertises that the EDGE (Enhanced Data for Global Evolution) network reaches over 13,000 U.S. cities and towns and typically manages download speeds of about 135Kbps -- not bad compared to the 53Kbps maximum of a V.90 modem.

What Sony calls a SmartWi software utility lets you toggle between WLAN and WWAN access, pairing either with Bluetooth but not using both Internet pathways at once. An on-screen indicator shows EDGE signal strength on a zero-to-five scale, like the bars on your cell-phone screen.

After launching a Cingular connection, we headed to Intel's and other online bandwidth-testing sites to see how its download speed compared to 802.11g. Suffice it to say that your mileage may vary, not just from place to place but from minute to minute: Sitting by an open window with a solid four-bar connection, data rates ranged from 94Kbps to an impressive 590Kbps, averaging around 230Kbps.

Moving to a room deep inside our office building and a flickering two-bar connection, however, our throughput took a dive -- sites took minutes to load as test results fell to a snail-paced 10Kbps. By contrast, our WiFi link delivered anything from 122Kbps to 896Kbps, averaging roughly 550Kbps.

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