Sony CR21 S/P laptop Review

This CR21 S/P gives our reviewer the shock of his life

The first thing I noticed when I opened up the box the CR21 review sample came in was the colour of its contents. Sony had given me a pink laptop (Luxury Pink, to be exact). Very nice, thank you Sony.

It's not that I don't like pink, it's just that being a bloke it's not the first choice of colours I tend to go for. But, as fellow editor Doug Harman tells me, you have to be a man to 'do' pink. So, I'll grit my teeth and get on with it.

While this particular model is more Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, the CR21 range does have other colourful - or not so - options. Although it should be noted that the specs and prices do vary as the range is quite extensive.

A lighter shade of Pink
Colour aside, the CR21 is a good looking laptop and as it's under the £1000 barrier it doesn't try to be anything it's not. But low price doesn't mean fewer features, as it seems with all Sony laptops the CR21 packs a lot in, but I'll get to that shortly.

The CR21 is by no means a light weight, coming in at 2.5kg (5.51 pounds), so after lugging it around all day you'll feel it. In fact it's heavier than Apple's 15inch MacBook Pro (5.4 pounds) which has a larger footprint.

The laptop's finish is two-tone, pink and silver. The top of the lid is a darker richer pink and the inside is a lighter shade, so one assumes that Sony felt that to go the whole way with the darker colour scheme would be a bit to much for the user - a bit of a pink explosion. The keyboard, trackpad area and screen surrounds come in this lighter shade, the exception being the low level keyboard itself which is in a matt silver. This same matt silver makes up the base of the CR21. Like the pink though, the silver comes in two flavours, the matt and a shiny silver that's used for the more visible trim.

And it's this trim that provides me with one of the only negatives I can find about the CR21, not the fact that it's shiny - although in my opinion it makes the overall appearance a little inconsistent - but the fact that it sticks out by a good 5mm from the main body of the notebook, that is what bugs me. Sure it does serve a purpose, it holds some indicator lights and AV control buttons (play, fast-forward etc.) but at the end of the day it looks like a bumper – a wanna-be chrome bumper – so perhaps it's more sheila's wheels than Priscilla.

Features
This is where Sony, as usual, have excelled themselves. I really think that you'd have a hard time finding another quality laptop with this CR21's feature set at the same price.

For starters there's the 14inch screen, which holds a decent enough resolution; it would have been nice to see it go a bit higher than the 1377 x 800, but for most purposes it does the job. The CR21S/P also bucks the growing trend in not shipping with a widescreen but with a more traditional squarer format, something that I feel makes this laptop a little friendlier.

The keyboard has a standard layout with those new, low-level keys, which have a nice bounce to them making it feel responsive in use and they're also not as clicky sounding as some - something that really annoys me.

Above the keyboard lives a few more little buttons, such as the sensibly placed power button, nice and secure and not possible to switch on by mistake. Next to this are volume, display, capture and AV mode buttons.

On the left side, there's the mandatory wireless switch (surely this could just be software lead), headphone and mic sockets, Firewire 400 (4in), two USB ports, an S video out and a VGA port for connecting. Over to the right we have the optical drive, ethernet and another USB port. Tucked round the back is a modem port for those still reliant on a dial up connection.

And for those of you that like to video chat, there's a Motion Eye camera mounted over the screen, like all the built in cameras that I've come accross in Sony laptops the Motion Eye is only 0.3 mega pixels, so in terms of quality... Erm, it's something that I think is just plain cheap! 

Build Quality
As mentioned, the CR21S/P isn't the smallest of laptops but this doesn't strike me as being a problem with this model, it posses a sturdy build and feels like it would withstand falling off a table (something I haven't tried, by the way). As the CR21S/P is aimed at the more home based market, rather than the busy suit, the extra weight probably isn't that much of an issue. It may have been nice to have a little less bulk but the overall finish carries the CR21S/P off.

I like the fact there’s a distinct lack of wobbly bits and loose port covers that feel like they’ll come off after a few uses (other Sony laptops take note) and the battery cover at the back is a snug fit, which it should be, again unlike some other laptops I’ve looked at.

The only negative thing I have found is that the battery runs down at what seems a biblically fast rate, even when apparently doing nothing, say, just sitting there snoozing with the lid down it burns power like no ones business. In short it's a bit of gas guzzler.

Whether this is down to a cheap power pack used by Sony in an attempt to reduce costs or (more likely) Vista Home Edition doing something when it shouldn’t, it does compromise its usability. After all, the main reason people buy notebooks such as this one is so they can be mobile with it, and unless you’re conservative to the extreme power settings-wise, you won’t get very far with this one.