Sony VAIO Fit Multi-flip 14A review

We weren’t big fans of the keyboard or touchpad, either. The keyboard is too flexible, and the keys felt spongy. This made them feel flat while we were typing, and while they were well-spaced, we would have preferred a lot more tactile feedback. However, the large all-in-one touchpad performed Windows 8 shortcuts accurately and responded quickly to our multitouch gestures.

Our biggest concern, though, is the flexibility of the Multiflip 14’s chassis; wiggling the bottom corners of the laptop produced a crunching noise from the keyboard. The keyboard tray also felt flimsy, and it bounced when we typed. We also noticed the touchscreen’s digitiser was pressing against the LCD display, which created a distortion effect in the screen’s corners that looked as if we were pressing a screen too hard with our finger. This is unforgivable on an £860 laptop.

This is all the more disappointing because the Multiflip 14 is pretty well specificed. Our review sample had a 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-4200U processor and 8GB of RAM. It performed a fraction slower in our PC benchmarks than other laptops we’ve seen with this processor, scoring 45 overall rather than the more common 47 scored by laptops such as the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 15. However, it’d be difficult to notice the two point deficit in everyday use.

You’ll certainly have no problem using the Multiflip 14 to browse the web and use office productivity software. The Multiflip 14 can even handle fairly modern 3D games, as long as you lower graphics quality settings. At a 1,280×720 resolution, no anti-aliasing and with graphics quality set to Low the Multiflip 14 produced a smooth average frame rate of 40.3fps.

We were disappointed to see a below average performance from the Multiflip 14’s battery, which was surprising given the laptop’s energy-efficient Haswell processor. The Multiflip 14 lasted just 6 hours in our light use test with the screen set to half brightness. We expect most laptops at this price to last around nine or 10 hours under the same conditions.

A further source of disappointment is that scarcity of ports. Those that are present amount to two USB3 ports, an SD card reader, a HDMI video output and a combined headphone and microphone jack.

Like the Sony Tap 11, the Vaio Multi-flip 14A is an interesting experiment in hybrid design, but ultimately it has too many flaws to justify its price. If you want a screen that can rotate to create a Windows 8 tablet, you should pay more for the superior Dell XPS 12. If £860 is your budget’s upper bound it’d be worth paying less for the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 15, which we think is a better buy.