Opening the laptop
up reveals a standard laptop QWERTY keyboard with a slight forward tilt
and a touchpad arrangement with twin buttons.
An electrostatic touchpad is used in place of the
IBM Trackpoint sometimes found on smaller notebooks. The touchpad worked as expected, with
nice sensitivity and decent button response. It is somewhat remarkable that Sony was able
to find enough space for the touch pad on this notebook, given
the scant little real estate to work with.
The keyboard maintains a key pitch of 15mm, as opposed to the ~18mm of a full
sized laptop keyboard, but feels comfortable due to the slight key tilt and
ample wrist rest area. The keys have
a throw of approximately 2mm as opposed
to 4mm for an average desktop keyboard.
The outer frame of the VAIO VGN-T140P/L is mostly
aluminum, and flipping the notebook over reveals yet more cooling vents for
the Pentium M processor. The notebook body reached
temperatures in the range of 45 degrees Celsius during testing. With
the screen closed, one detail that concerned us slightly was the lack of a mechanical catch
to lock it in that position. Sony instead relies on the stiffness
of the hinge to hold screen in its closed position. While this means that there
is no latch to break in the future, we're not so sure about the longevity of the
hinge.
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