There’s no doubt, Sony is a leading player when it comes to cool looking, compact, and powerful products.

Among the compact notebooks available, the Vaio T and now TT, are attractive, so we asked Sony Japan to send over a TT-70 for us to fool around with.

If you recall, the previous T generation came with a Core 2 Duo U7600 at 1.2GHz, 2GB of RAM, 100GB of HDD, Intel 945GMS Express, DVD Multi and an 11.1” LED backlight screen. Pretty nice for a notebook released in 2007, now this year Sony boosted the thing up a little with the TT.

For our quick hands-on and dirty quick review, we asked Sony for a TT-70 featuring a Core 2 Duo SU9300 at 1.20GHz, 4GB of RAM, Intel GS45 Express with HDMI out, Blu-ray burner, and a 11’1 LED backlight screen.

With a slightly modified casing, the TT (TT-70 in our case) has a more mature look and a nice touch of style.

We’re not going to go too deep in details here, they’re WAY more professional websites and reviews with stories about this PC. We’ll just give you our thoughts and leave the pleasure of extensively testing this new Vaio to the pros.

The first thing we noticed, and you can see in the gallery, is how bright the T screen is compared to the TT. The T screen also reproduces better colors, everything on the TT appears saturated. Although both have about the same specs, with a newer CPU for the TT, we didn’t see any improvements. They seem equivalent. Same thing for the keyboard, I’m personally not very found of this kind of keyboard, but working on either of them was pretty much the same. I’m also not a big fan of the T’s aluminum like buttons, when ejecting a DVD or playing with the volume. With the TT Sony exchanged the “bling-bling” for more common black finished keys.

If you’re an HD Video fan, you’ll definitely appreciate the TT’s Blu-ray option and its HDMI output which work flawlessly. Don’t get too excited by the TT’s 1080 Full HD logo, it’s only for the HDMI output. Nevertheless, watching a Blu-ray movie on it is as painless as watching a DVD.

Despite their compact size, both the TT and T are astonishingly heavy. They look small and light, but they’re just plain small. If you’re used to using a Panasonic W8/7 you’ll be surprised how heavy the TT is.

Final words…

Is the TT ideal for working with on the go? Ideal no, maybe not, but surely one of the best. The TT-70 fully loaded and with its 1-Seg TV tuner (for Japan and in Japanese only) is really nice to carry if you move around a lot.

Would I want to use it for hours at a time? Surely not, typing more than three pages with it is a pain for me. Will other future TT owners use it as their primary? That’s another question.