The Sony VAIO UX390, as every laptop, UMPC or gadget, has it’s good parts and bad parts. It has a long battery life, a SSD ( solid state drive ) , but it’s keyboard is hard to use, nontactile and it’s too expensive for it’s performances. Anyway, those kind of devices aren’t very practical yet, even if they have the same features and softwares as the normal-size PCs, they have too small display and keyboard.It measures 5.9×3.7×1.5 inches and has a 4.5″ display, when opened having 5.25″ deep. The UMPC weights 1.1 pounds without the AC adapter and 1.6 including it, but it’s quite heavy for it’s sizes.

It’s 4.5″ display has a 1,024×600 native resolution and high quality image. It has two zoom keys on it’s right size, but the zooming is slow and the image is hard to see, so they’re mostly useless. Under the slider display, it has a backlit keyboard composed of very small hard-to-press keys and is even lacking some of the usual keys on a standard QWERTY keyboard.

The web pages are hard to read and surf, due to it’s resolution of 600 pixels high and it requires a lot of scrolling. Also, the page up and page down keys would be very useful for website navigation, but they are lacking and you have to combine the function key with up or down arrow keys, which is pretty hard.

The Sony VAIO UX390 works both with a stylus and your finger, but it’s recommended to use the stylus, for better precision and for keeping the display clean and it also works much better with it.

About connectivity, it has a memory card reader, a headphone and microphone standard jack, one USB 2.0 port and a webcam. To increase it’s connectivity, it comes with a docking station, that sports an Ethernet board, a mini FireWire port, three USB 2.0 ports, an A/V for connecting an external monitor, Bluetooth, 802.11a/b/g WiFi and EV-DO, using a small antenna.

As default, the Sony VAIO UX390 comes with a Intel Core Solo U1500 1.3Ghz processor, 1GB of DDR2 RAM and Intel 945GM graphics card. Thanks to the 32GB SSD drive, it has no moving or mechanical parts, having an increased battery life, a lower time access and lower heating. Unfortunately, it has a too low capacity SSD, when it could come equiped with a 128 or at least a 64GB one, especially that it comes with Windows Vista Business, which fills the drive.

This UMPC is not quite the fastest and best PC, but it has good performances for it’s sizes and it makes competition to ultraportable laptops, which are much bigger. But the ultraportables have another plus, in front of the UMPC, being much more functional, due to the 11 or 12inch displays and standard or almost standard size keyboard.

Another bad part of this and all UMPCs is the short battery life, in our case being of about 3 hours. There have been done major improvements to the UMPCs battery life, but it’s hard to make it enough for our needs, mostly because it stocks such performance in such a small case.

The Sony VAIO UX390 has a one year warranty, which includes free shipping and 24/7 toll-free phone support. If you want to extend the warranty to 3 years, you have to pay $299 more, or you may just pay $20 for each phone call made to tech support.