Back in July, I wrote an in-depth article about what kind of laptops I think are best for the mobile professionals [READ]. At the time of writing that article, my workhorse was a two-year old Toshiba U200 – a very portable, lightweight 12.3″ laptop. When I bought the laptop, I was spending a lot more time on the road going to meetings, working out of coffee shops and that kind of thing. Now, I’m working out of a client’s office in downtown three days a week. I’m driving to work most days and I need power more than I need portability. This led me to seek out a more powerful, less portable laptop solution. After looking around at the options on the market, I ended up going with Sony’s new FW laptop platform.

Before getting into what I like about this unit, here are the basic specs:

The most significant things most people notice about this computer at first glance is the format of the screen (really wide) and the design of the machine (unique). After using this laptop reguarly for a week, I can tell you the real value of this machine is its power. With a dedicated video card, the Core 2 Duo processors and 4 GB of RAM, this machine just screams through my relatively mundane computing needs.

It’s not light but I’m not running all over town on transit and on foot with this thing so I don’t worry about that too much. The battery life is an acceptable 2.5 hours in practice – not that I worry about that too much now that I have my 15-hour+ external battery [READ].

I was originally planning on getting an external monitor to extend my desktop but so far – the 16.4″ screen is plenty big enough for most applications. My home office rig is a much more powerful quad-core desktop PC with two giant monitors so when doing more complex Photoshop or Illustrator projects, I’ll use my home computer.

This laptop doesn’t fit into a regular laptop bag – you’re going to need an extra-large bag. It also gets hot as you use it so to keep it running at peak performance, make sure you have it elevated on your desk and try not to use it on soft surfaces. It needs lots of airflow around it.

Sony takes a lot of heat for the “bloatware” that gets bundled with the computers from the factory. I didn’t notice too much but there’s a lot of system software from Sony that I’m not sure is necessary.

At the end of the day, the price point of this laptop makes it a very good deal. It retails for around $1,300 and I picked it up for just under $1,200. The inclusion of the Blu Ray drive with HDMI out means you could hook it up to your HDTV to watch Blu Ray movies if you don’t already have a stand-alone player.

I wouldn’t recommend this laptop for extremely mobile workers but if you’re going to be “hotelling” regularly at a regular office with a desk, it’s a nice format.