Photo gallery: Fujitsu LifeBook T2010One of the last truly Japanese brands left on the market, Fujitsu has produced this latest entry into the tablet world. Tablets have come a long way since their initial introduction, with Windows Vista in particular making tablet use a joy.
Design
The T2010 is quite rugged and business like, with a rotating glossy monitor that will happily flip left or right. When the monitor is turned around and sat flush against the keyboard so the screen is facing outwards, the display flips to a portrait orientation, switching the 1280x800 screen to 800x1280 -- although this can be changed in software. A fingerprint scanner is situated on the bottom left of the screen, while five buttons (page up, page down, screen rotate, fn, alt, all of which act as buttons for a security pin as well) and a power button are positioned on the right.
Apart from the obvious pen (which is stored in the bottom right), navigation is performed via thumbstick, which is vastly annoying, displays a propensity to move the cursor after you've lifted your hand off it and is considerably less accurate compared to a track pad, which has been removed so the battery can be stuck at the front of the machine rather than the rear. The left and right mouse buttons are a pain to push, quite likely due to being sloped upwards and being the same moulded piece of plastic. In an uncommon but welcome addition, a middle mouse button is included.
A tiny mono speaker is situated on the bottom right, meaning the already weedy audio disappears whenever you touch the keyboard, your hand muffling the sound.
Features
While Fujitsu gets points for the combined SD/Memory Stick reader and its dedication to security through Smart Card, BIOS/hard drive lock, fingerprint and Lifebook lock, it loses out on the mono speaker and lack of optical drive -- both of which Sony manages to trump in the smaller, yet admittedly more consumer focused VGN-TZ17GN/N. An older, still business important PCMCIA type II slot is present rather than the newer Express Card standard, the smart card slot situated below that.
An anemic two USB ports are offered, and a VGA port is hidden behind a panel that will likely shear free after a few years of use. A firewire port and headphone/microphone port are supplied -- and that's it as far as connectivity is concerned.
Using the notebook as a tablet is a pretty standard affair and is pleasing enough, however despite our best efforts we couldn't find an option to increase the sensitivity of the screen, as it felt that sometimes we had to press a little hard to get the response we wanted.
Performance
This is certainly a business laptop, the Intel GMA X3100 making sure that games are a no-no, the low 3DMark06 score of 435 and average PCMark05 score of 2835 attesting to this.
Not having an optical drive made the battery test a little more difficult than usual, as we playback a DVD with all power saving features turned off, screen brightness and performance set to maximum. To overcome this we transferred an image of the DVD to the hard drive, and played off that, the notebook lasting two hours and 12 minutes before succumbing to blackness.
The LifeBook T2010 qualifies as a middle of the road offering from Fujitsu. It'll do the job, but you'll want to poke around at its competitors like the updated version of Toshiba's Portege M400 before deciding first.
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