Long term hardware impressions – Sony VAIO P

The difference in use is that with the mouse-nub, you press and hold in the direction that you would like to move the mouse, as opposed to continuously having to lift and touch your finger on a trackpad. There are some potential complications with the nub-mouse scheme though. I’ve seen the dreaded ‘drift’ occur on the VAIO P, which is when the mouse slowly drifts in one direction. Usually just moving the mouse around for a moment will fix it, but it can be annoying sometimes.

Another problem I had that is uniquely associated with the position of the mouse-nub on the VAIO P (right in the center of the keyboard) is and issue with tap-to-click. As you might know, trackpads these days have a tap-to-click function which allows you lift your fingers and tap on one spot on the trackpad and it will interpret it as a left click. Most mouse-nubs have the same feature. However, because the mouse-nub on the VAIO P is in the center of the keyboard and the center keys are actually somewhat misshapen in order to accommodate it (see the G, H, and B keys in the image above), it is easy to accidentally hit the mouse while typing and have it interpreted as a click. This might not sound like a big deal, but it can have consequences that are as annoying as a tiny shift key placed right next to the up arrow. Imagine yourself right now typing a paper. Your cursor is likely to be over the body of the text because you’ve probably been using it to highlight and make changes to words. Now imagine that you are in the middle of typing and someone keeps clicking your mouse so that the text input cursor keeps jumping up into the middle of another word in a different sentence. I think you can imagine how annoying that could get. It actually took me a little while to understand why this kept happening because the mouse-nub must have been very sensitive to the tapping, and while typing fast it is hard to realize that you’ve touched it. Annoying, yes, but it can be fixed. The easiest way for me to get rid of it was to simply turn off the tap-to-click feature which can be done in the mouse options menu. Another way you could have fix it is to reduce the sensitivity of the tap-to-click feature which should be adjustable through the mouse controlling utility, AlpsPoint. I decided to turn it off completely because I do a lot of typing, and I didn’t ever want my text input cursor to jump seemingly to random lines while I’m in the middle of typing. A simple software fix for this issue, requiring no action from the user, would be to simply dynamically disable the tap-to-click after a series of keys has been pressed and keep it disabled for one or two seconds after the last key has been hit.

Overall the VAIO P holds up to the quality standard that I would expect from Sony. I wouldn’t mind the mouse buttons, wireless radio switch, and power slider to feel a bit more solid, but other than that the unit is quite firmly built. If you often work in an environment that requires a strong hinge strength, be sure to test out the VAIO P’s before purchasing. It is very easy to move which can be good for some people, but if you are trying to work in a vehicle such as a bus, car, or plane, it may flop around on you which wouldn’t be fun or productive.

Thanks for sticking with me through the review. This section just about wraps up the official review roadmap. A big shout-out to Dynamism for loaning us the VAIO P for review.

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