Sony upgrades VAIO S and Z laptops to Ivy Bridge, debuts two new VAIO E notebooks

The Japanese tech manufacturer Sony announced in a series of press releases that it will soon start selling upgraded VAIO S and Z notebooks, and a duo of new VAIO E laptops. Unfortunately, the outfit has not yet disclosed official pricing and availability details.

The VAIO S models come in two screen sizes: 13.3-inch and 15.5-inch, and reportedly offer a slim, “full-flat” design. Sony also claims the S Series 13 and 15 portable computers are built using magnesium, aluminium and carbon fibre.

According to the maker, the VAIO S 15 is equipped with a third generation Ivy Bridge Intel Core i7-3612QM CPU that packs four processing cores clocked at 2.1GHz (up to 3.1GHz through Turbo Boost). The chip (22nm) further offers 6MB of L3 cache, Hyper-Threading support (8 threads) and the integrated Intel HD 4000 (3D Tri-Gate architecture) graphics card. In addition, the S Series 15 model sports a Full HD (1920-by-1080 pixels) widescreen In-Plane Switching (for improved viewing angles) display, an optional DVD/Blu-ray optical drive and an NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M GPU.

Other features of the S Series include a 500GB HDD, 8GB of on-board memory, LTE connectivity (on selected models), a couple of USB 3.0 ports, Wireless LAN 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0+HS radios.

The VAIO Z light and thin notebook is driven by the same Quad-Core CPU, but comes with a 13.1-inch 16:9 panel of Full HD native resolution. It weighs 1.18kg with the built-in battery, measures just 16.5mm at its thickest point and ships with a 256GB SSD, and an HD web camera for video conferencing. The Power Media Dock (if you choose to buy one) accommodates a Blu-ray optical drive and an AMD Radeon HD 7670M video card.

Last month, the Tokyo-headquartered company unveiled the VAIO E Series 14P. Now, it is officially adding two new units to the E lineup. The 15.5-inch (1366-by-768 pixels) E 15 and 17.3-inch (1600-by-900 pixels) E 17 will be powered by Intel Core i5-2450M processors with a clock frequency of 2.5GHz - 3.1GHz.

Furthermore, the E Series features an AMD Radeon HD 7650M GPU with 1GB/2GB of dedicated VRAM, a 750GB HDD (5400RPM), a DVD/Blu-ray Burner, USB 3.0 connectivity and 6GB of DDR3 1333MHz memory.

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