Light, that's the first thing you'll think about when you pick up the Sony Vaio Pro 11, the company's new diddy Ultrabook. Well that's certainly the first thing we thought about when we picked one up at an Intel event toasting the confirmation by polar explorer Ben Saunders that he is about to retrace Scott's famous, and ultimately ill-fated, 1,800-mile trek across Antarctica.

Polar adventures aside, he picked the Vaio Pro because it's only 900 grams - the sleek and masculine laptop is diminutive to say the least.

The case is clad in metal with a sharp leading edge that adds a crisp finish to the proceedings. The side houses the usual array of connectors; the front, tucked under the lip an SD card slot; and the base a docking port to add the option battery pack that will extend the battery life to a promised 25 hours.

sony vaio pro 11 pictures and hands on image 3

Open the lid and the Ultrabook springs into action instantly. The design of the laptop means that the keyboard becomes slightly tilted towards you, making for an angled rather than flat typing experience, and the keys felt comfortable in the quick couple of typing tests we were able to perform. 

The 11.6-inch touchscreen touts all the new Sony techs like Bravia, Triluminos and X-Reality, and the results, helped by the Windows UI, are certainly vibrant. While the glossy screen did give us some issues in seeing what was going on, the colour quality of images is very nice.

The touchscreen display also means you can take full advantage of the Windows 8 UI and everything was as responsive as you would imagine or hope for - after all the Vaio Pro sports a Core i5 Haswell processor.

 sony vaio pro 11 pictures and hands on image 15

The model we played with had a 1.6Ghz Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, and was running Windows 8 Pro. 

Sadly we weren't able to test battery life, or really push the graphics capabilites, improved by 50 per cent and 40 per cent respectively, but will make sure we test both throughly in our full review when the new laptop hits the shops later this month. 

Sony tells Pocket-lint that the 13-inch model will cost around £1000, so expect the 11-inch version to be less than that, but also possibly more if you opt to trick it out with all the toys.