The Exterior

In typical Sony fashion the exterior of the Sony VAIO E Series SVE15134CXW has a very well built and stylish look to it. It is available in either White, Silver of Pink. I personally find the Silver model to be the most elegant of them, but the other 2 colors are also nice if you like them.
The white and pink models have the top cover in shiny plastic with the VAIO logo in chrome, while the silver model has a brushed aluminum look to it, and with only the outline of the VAIO logo in chrome. The shiny variants will most likely become fingerprint and scratch magnets pretty fast. I don’t think their good looking finish will last as long as the silver variant.
The rest of the chassis is covered in two tone plastic, with black and the color you choose. The sides are black with the rim in color and there’s a black strip running from one side to the other above the keyboard. The Sony VAIO E Series SVE15134CXW comes with a very nice full sized Chiclet-style keyboard with numeric keypad and backlighting. The keyboard is either white for the white and pink models or black for the silver model. The backlighting is useful in dim lighting and at night.

The palmrest is kept very clean with the touchpad slightly to the left side, underneath the space bar for ideal typing and an engraved VAIO logo in the top left corner underneath the keyboard. The touchpad doesn’t have any visible buttons. They are integrated in the design and are used by pressing down on the corners of the touchpad. This clean toutchpad design can also be found on other models form other manufacturers. The power button, the status LEDs and a couple of Sony specific function buttons are all located above the keyboard on the right side, above of witch there are the speakers, one on each side.

The Connectivity

The Sony VAIO E Series SVE15134CXW comes with every possible connectivity port you might possibly need in a laptop. All the ports are located on the sides of the laptop, with only the memory card readers in front.

We have the Power port, Ethernet port, VGA and HDMI out, USB 3.0 and microphone and headset port on the left side of the chassis, with 3 USB 2.0 ports, the DVD-RW drive and the Kensington security slot on the right.
It’s really nice that this Sony has all these USB ports(4) while most laptops only have 2 or 3. The only strange part is that where most manufacturers offer 1 USB 2.0 and the rest USB 3.0, Sony has decided to do it the other way around, with only 1 USB 3.0 port.
On the inside we find this device has high speed Wireless-N Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity.

The Performance

At this price you would expect the The Sony VAIO E Series SVE15134CXW to be very well equipped. Where all it’s competitors in this price range come with Intel Core i5s, this device comes with a 3rd generation Intel Core i3-3120M running at 2.5 GHz. This is the second most powerful Mobile Core i3, just behind the i3-3130M running at 2.6 GHz. I think the performance will not disappoint, even if most other manufacturers offer Core i5 Processors. In combination with the tried and tested integrated Intel HD 4000 this device will be capable of playing some of the more recent games, just. A dedicated video card would have suited this device better.
This will also be helped by the 6GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM preinstalled on the system. This will be enough to do some serious multitasking and running some very memory intensive applications. The RAM can be upgraded to a maximum of 8GB.
The storage capabilities also are very good, with a 750GB HDD spinning at 5400rpm. The storage is more than enough for anyone.
The declared battery life seems very small with just 2.75 Hours. This is not surprising with a battery pack of just 4000mAh. As I have seen on other models also, Sony usually supplies their laptops with small batteries.

I guess what you gain with the nice design, backlit keyboard, you loose in the performance department. I would have expected a better processor and a better battery for this price.