- The Good: Clean, sleek tablet with good design and useful features.
- The Bad: A little heavy, despite a lack of internal CD drive; lid catch is clumsy; loud fan.
- The Verdict: The Fujitsu LifeBook is a nice addition to the tablet market, with a few minor flaws.
REVIEW:
Making the perfect tablet PC is an almost impossible task. Users will want it to have plenty of features, lots of power and a bright screen, but will also expect it to be light enough to carry around for hours at a time and to last for hours on a single battery charge. Fujitsu's LifeBook 3000 is a nice blend of these features, although it has a few minor flaws.
From the point of view of pure looks, the LifeBook is an appealing package. It has a nice combination grey-blue and silver metallic finish with stylish accents, a well laid-out keyboard with a touchpad below, and a large bright screen. The pen-shaped stylus slides into a slot to the left of the screen, which rotates on a single inch-wide central hinge and folds flat.
The LifeBook has a series of buttons on the front below the screen so that various functions can be accessed when it is in tablet mode, such as switching the screen from landscape to portrait mode.
One slightly awkward aspect of the Fujitsu's setup was that it required a key sequence to complete the boot-up, which meant opening the unit, since the keyboard is covered up when in tablet mode.
The Fujitsu tablet had another feature that's worth mentioning for anyone planning to use the built-in wireless (or Wi-Fi) networking, and that is a small switch on the back edge of the unit with the words "on" and "off" on it. For those of you who may not read the manual — as I didn't — this turns the wireless features of the notebook on and off. This is handy, but it can be embarrassing if you (or one of your children) accidentally turns it off and you wonder why your wireless connection isn't working.
With many electronic devices, it is the small things that tend to stand out — either because they really work well, or because they are aggravating. For me, the LifeBook's bugaboo was the catch that holds the lid closed. Whether in laptop mode or in tablet mode, the closure just didn't seem to want to work properly the first time, although it usually worked after a bunch of fiddling. Designed as a two-way catch, sliding one way to keep the lid closed as a laptop and rotating to catch the lid in tablet mode, it didn't seem to do either easily.
That's a relatively picky thing to hold against a tablet, however, and when it comes to most of the big things the LifeBook holds its own with other tablets. At about four pounds, it is far from the lightest tablet but lighter than some, in part because it has no CD drive. It comes with a standalone drive unit that connects via the USB port — which is somewhat cumbersome to carry around, since it has its own power supply, but does keep the weight down when you don't need a drive. And if you're planning to really use a tablet as a tablet, having it be light is important.
That said, while it may take longer to become a burden than some other heavier devices, you will still notice the weight of the LifeBook on your arm when using it as a tablet — and you may also notice the warmth of the device after an hour or two of use, either on your arm or on your lap. In part, this is because the smaller a device gets, the harder it is to displace all the heat. And the LifeBook is hot despite the obvious presence of a fan, which occasionally runs so loudly that it sounds as though something has gone wrong inside the unit.
Those caveats aside, the LifeBook is a nice size for a tablet. It is large enough that the keyboard doesn't feel like a cramped little toy, but not so large that it doesn't feel portable. At 12 inches, the screen is a good size and is sharp and bright for a touch screen. The 1.4 gigahertz processor in the unit is enough for most tasks, too.
Although there were some problems with the wireless networking connection (apart from switching it off), they seemed largely a result of environmental factors — either the location of a "hotspot" or the setup of a particular network — rather than the unit itself.
As far as battery life is concerned, Fujitsu says the LifeBook is good for 4.5 hours, although in my tests it lasted closer to 3.5 hours. Although that is better than several other tablet PCs out there, it isn't really anything to write home about.
One interesting feature in the tablet is a "bridge" battery that last for five minutes, allowing a user to swap batteries without powering the unit down. And if you're going to be out of the office for awhile, you should probably have a spare with you.
Apart from a few aggravating details, the LifeBook is a sleek and useful unit, which should definitely be on the list for anyone contemplating a tablet. And at a street price of about $2,500 (Cdn.), it should be within most laptop buyers' budgets.
