It’s been a pretty busy week and a half for me! As is plain to see via my site, I’ve rediscovered my ability to program and get an application out the door. In fact, I figure it took a total of eight days for SharpMT, to go from start to finish… and then finish again, with a second beta on the same day as the first release. This is the first application I’ve worked on that has seen the light of day in a very long while, as well as the first application I’ve coded in C#. It was also the first application that I had the pleasure of coding from my couch, my train, and my Starbucks. OH! how I love this freakin’ Sony.

The Sony Z1A has been an absolute dream to work with. It does get hotter than my old 505VE, especially when it’s charging, but not nearly as hot as my battery powered PowerBook, so it was definately a step in the right direction.

The Z1A has offered me nearly constant perfection. The CPU is more than powerful enough to compile code, design forms, and all sorts of fun stuff. The CPU at full power (on AC power) is a Pentium-M 1.3GHz (Centrino) chip; it drops to a reduced speed level while on battery power, but I don’t know what speed it drops to. What I do know is that I hardly noticed when it was on battery life or on AC power, so whatever the slow speed is, it’s still fast. The 60GB hard drive and 512MB RAM is more than enough room for Visual Studio.NET 2002 to run and that’s a pretty good test of any system’s capabilities.

Battery power, while actively compiling, lasted about 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 hours, so that was pretty encouraging. The 802.11b has been flawless – my LinkSys 802.11b WAP54 access point has been crapping out from time to time, but new firmware can fix that. The screen has been really great on full brightness; it’s pretty good at 50% brightness, which is the default profile for Maximum Battery Life. Keyboard: great for me. The smaller shift key on the right side caused a friend of mine to have an episode and a half on Friday night, but that’s user error – no one uses the right shift key on a keyboard!

So why the “near perfection” bit? The trackpad has me a bit perplexed. It seems to get stuck from time to time, but only with my right index finger. If it gets stuck and I change fingers, it’s fine. Given that this is my most used keyboard finger – musical and computer – and the most used bass playing finger (I get shit all the time because I play the bass with just two fingers, instead of eight like a normal player would) I figure there’s a subtle dead spot on the tip or something. The 505JL that I had did this same thing – after six months with that, I replaced the trackpad myself and it didn’t change the behavior. The 505VE was a bit more responsive, but the Z1A seems to be more like the 505JL. This is “OK” with me because it’s not worse than what I had before.

The only other thing wrong with it is a physical problem with the case. My Centrino sticker wore off already! And then the ATI Radeon is still there, but the print has been worn off. The “Designed for Windows XP” sticker is already gummy… it’ll be gone sooner than later I think. Bah!

Of course if these are the only things I’ve found to complain about, this is truly the pinnacle of notebooks. Sony nailed this one, hands down.

Then again, with the missing stickers, my Z1A is now “________ Inside”!