Sony Duo 11 Ultrabook - Blurring the line between tablet and laptop

Sony Duo 11 Ultrabook - Blurring the line between tablet and laptop

Unpacking the Sony Duo 11 reveals what appears to be a tablet; no keyboard is immediately visible. The Duo 11 is not just a tablet. Lifting up the top edge tilts the display and reveals a sliding keyboard hidden beneath the panel.

Welcome to the world of Windows 8 sliders. The Duo 11 keeps its keyboard tucked underneath the tablet's bottom chassis - it's there when you need it, but you can hide it away when you don't.

The Duo 11 weighs in at 1.3 kg, decidedly on the light side for an Ultrabook. The 11.6-inch screen offers a full 1920-by-1080-pixel IPS touchscreen panel that provides good image quality and color fidelity. 

It's so detailed that using the Windows Desktop via touchscreen is difficult because the text and buttons are so much smaller than your fingertip. Sony figured this out early and supplies a stylus to save you considerable frustration. Sony built a full Wacom digitizer into the touchscreen, complete with a stylus supporting 256 levels of pressure sensitivity. Artists will appreciate the digitizer, but Sony didn't think to include a slot to store the stylus in the body of the unit, so you'll need to keep track of it as you travel.

The Duo 11 meets Intel's Ultrabook spec: It's light, it boots quickly from the 128GB solid-state drive, and it measures just 0.71 inch thick. The machine carries an Intel Core i5-3317U processor, and 4GB of system RAM. Since it's an Ultrabook, its graphics hardware consists of the on-board Intel HD 4000 GPU built into the Ivy Bridge low-voltage processor. 

Sony wedges six rows of keys into just 3.5 inches of vertical space, and there's a surprisingly vast amount of emptiness between each key. The result is a true chiclet keyboard experience (albeit a backlit one), where touch typing is a bit of a challenge. 

There's no room left for a touchpad, so Sony uses a device that looks like a pointing stick but works like a trackpad, wedged in among the G, H, and B keys.

The Duo 11 is equipped with the increasingly standard 1.7GHz Core i5 and 128GB SSD drive. Ports include VGA, SD/Memory Stick, Ethernet, HDMI, and two USB 3.0 ports.