Fujitsu's LifeBook P1610 reviewed

It's sexy, it's small, but is it any good? Laptop Mag took Fujitsu's LifeBook P1610 out on the town and they sure seem to think so. Despite the "cute" comments they received on the street, there's enough going on here to suit the demanding road warrior that wants to pack light. Notably impressive on this 8.9-inch screened unit is a "remarkably usable" keyboard, along with a quite impressive LCD, which might be a bit squint-inducing at 1280 x 768, but fended off ambient light quiet well. With a Core Solo processor, 1GB of RAM and an 80GB HDD the reviewer found performance to be quite good under Windows XP Professional, though Vista Business is also an option. The 3-cell battery musters a respectable 3.5 hours of battery, but a 6-cell battery doubles that time, and the 5 additional ounces aren't going to ruin your day when the laptop only weighs 2.2 pounds initially. There's no touchpad, and the stylus isn't of the fancy RF variety, but the pointing stick and included plastic stylus both worked quite well for input, and the convertible tablet switches quite nicely to tablet mode. Other perks include a PC card slot for adding 3G data, and a refreshingly small palm-sized power brick -- Fujitsu doesn't seem to have cut many corners. The main complaint of build quality is a weak latch that doesn't do much to secure the tablet in slate mode, but shouldn't be a deal breaker. As Laptop Mag warns, this form factor obviously isn't for everyone, but if it is you can't go far wrong with the P1610.

[rektide @ Feb 8th 2007 5:40PM]

is 1280x720 correct? all the P1000 series so far have wielded 1024x600 displays. then again, none of them were hybrid tablets (although they were touchscreen).

hte build quality on my old p1120 is superb. the fact that its still functioning is a testament to some truly wonderful product engineering.

[Jeff Foster @ Feb 8th 2007 6:02PM]

sexy? is it?

you PC guys are weird.

[macstibs @ Feb 8th 2007 6:07PM]

I have the p1510d... the previous iteration... I think the real downside to these minilaptops is that they're constrained by the 4200rpm 1.8" drives. SSD or 5400rpm or something for the love of god...

[themessage @ Feb 8th 2007 10:13PM]

I've had mine for about a month. All I could ask for is a skinnier led screen gps core duo version...but I'm sure all that will come out in another tablet in the next few months. The biggest selling point is that the keyboard is still usable at this size, depending on your finger size. I'm still getting my normal 100+ wpm. When I tried using a smaller 7" convertible tablet, it was almost impossible to type at that speed. I've been using it with my bluetooth gps as a mobile laptop/gps travel guide.

[Rick @ Feb 9th 2007 8:49AM]

I have a 1510 which works nicely as my 24/7 home server, closed up, sitting on a laptop cooling pad. It's connected to an Infrant RAID storage. It runs my bittorrent, ssh, and music server quite nicely. People are always amazed by my 'tiny' server.

[Whtrbt7 @ Feb 10th 2007 3:04PM]

I'm currently typing this on my own P1610 which is phenomenal. The 4200rpm drive can be replaced with a 2.5 inch SSD at 32GB from Samsung or PQI. The biggest drawback however is the lack of SATA for the drive. The architecture of the chassis however is great and it's very solid. For those thinking that they want an LED lit thin LCD, think again. The size of the bezel includes fingerprint reader, hard buttons, and the microphone which require the extra room and the hinge needs to be hearty enough to withstand corporate use. A thinner screen would be a mistake in my opinion since it would crack like a wafer. The 720p display is great compared to the 600p display on the old P1510D. The rotation of the physical screen is great, screen rotation software however has taken away 180 and 270 degree rotation which is a bit of an issue since the fan is supposed to face towards the sky (heat rises!!!!) when in horizontal tablet mode. When the P1610 is combined with an HSDPA PCMCIA card, the combination makes it formidable especially when compared to the OQO 02. I have to say that I prefer the slightly larger 8.9 inch passive digitizer to the 5 inch active digitizer in the OQO 02.

[Tristan @ Feb 15th 2007 9:40AM]

Is there any alternative for this laptop, maybe the R400 (lot bigger) from Toshiba is the closest thing?