(1 votes, average: 9 out of 10)
Loading ...The Littlest Notebook
To tell the truth, I wasn’t paying 100 per cent attention when Irving Frydman at Fujitsu offered to send along the new LifeBook U810 for review. I thought he’d be sending one of the slim, shiny laptops I’ve grown to covet over the years for their impossibly light weight, sexy form factor and richly detailed LCD displays (not to mention their correspondingly hefty price tags).
What turned up was, while tiny, certainly not like the machines I’ve test-driven before. While Fujitsu calls the U810 a notebook computer, you could argue it’s a convertible tablet UMPC. It’s smaller than a paperback, with a compressed keyboard, 5.6-inch touchscreen, built-in Web cam and fingerprint reader, and runs on Windows Vista Basic. You can get full specs here.
I drafted this post on the subway, alternating between the surprisingly accurate, but far from perfect, handwriting recognition and the tiny keyboard. Of the latter: You’ll have to resort to four-finger hunt-and-peck keying, partly because of the size of the keys — the alpha keys are a half-inch across — and partly because the symbols and function keys are crammed onto the alpha keys, accessible through a function key.
Look at it as a tiny laptop, and it’s frustrating. Typos abound unless you’ve got aristocratically thin fingers (mine aren’t exactly sausages). The square pad to control the cursor is located on the right side of the screen mount, with left and right mouse buttons on the left side. It’s an interesting implementation, but it’s largely useless because of the speed at which the cursor crosses the screen and its tiny icons. This leads to a hybrid keyboard-stylus mode of operation that takes some getting used to.
Running standard Windows apps is frustrating — text and icons can be so small as to be practically unusable. But it’s not meant to be a laptop replacement. It works well as a slate. It makes practically no dent in the space in my courier bag (no, it’s not a man purse) and only weighs a pound and a half. It boasts a five-plus-hour battery life, and would be perfect for hauling around presentations and gathering contact information on the road. And, hey, I finished this draft in a phone booth — how cool is that?
October 26th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
Courier bag? Get over it and call it what it is - a purse. I’ve had one for the past 7 years. I basically set the trend in Toronto. A nurse is a nurse whether they’re male or female and a purse is a purse whether carried by a male or female.
Anyways, thanks for the candid review. One thing you didn’t mention are the connectivity options, such as WiFI, wired Ethernet, GPRS (EVDO/GSM), WiMAX etc.
June 8th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
it looks nice.