Sony certainly makes distinctive-looking laptops. And in a market saturated with cookie-cutter gray boxes (or now, endless MacBook Air knockoffs), that's more important than it may seem at first. Even better, Sony also happens to make very good laptops, and I can probably count the number of real lemons found in the Sony Vaio line over the past five-plus years on the fingers of one hand.
Sony VAIO F
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
The Vaio F Series, represented here by the VPC-F236FM/B configuration, is a 16-inch multimedia machine. It's a not very common in-between size--a bit too big to be mainstream, but too small to be a desktop replacement. That said, with a Blu-ray drive, Nvidia GeForce 540M graphics, and a full 1080p resolution display, it's a tricked-out movie-and-gaming machine (perhaps the "F" stands for full-featured--Sony's Vaio naming conventions are among the most maddening in all of laptop-dom).
But it's also a premium-priced system, at $1,459 (different configurations from Sony's online shop start at $1,049). The look is certainly distinctive, with sharp angles and a raised wrist rest, but HP's 15-inch Envy 15 offers a similar mix of power and style in a slimmer chassis, starting at around the same price. If you want a screen that's just a little larger, and the overall size of this Vaio happens to be exactly what you're looking for, it's certainly a well-made, well-polished machine, and is a good reminder that, aside from Apple, Sony is generally the "reach" brand laptop shoppers actively seek out.