Hands-on with the Fujitsu u810 tablet
By Barb Dybwad 
posted Jan 7th 2008 10:57AM
posted Jan 7th 2008 10:57AM
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Holy crap, that thing is all kinds of ugly.
It's not too bad in real life. My wife and I played with one in Microcenter, and found it to be OK.
This thing has keyboard problems. Put backspace, plus, minus, tilde etc. back where they belong (or somewhere out of the way) and give it a normal spacebar, and we'll talk.
And the stickers? Come on. Haven't we gotten past that yet?
It doesn't look brilliant but it doesn't look it will break the first time you swizzle that little joine (like some tablets)
*joint
Its already world's better than the Eee PC.
It'll cost you half a world too.
do you know if they added an SSD drive?
Fry's in Palo Alto, CA has one of these with an steel cage holding it in place. Although I couldn't full explore it due to that, the one thing I did decide is that the keyboard is entirely useless. It's to big for thumbs and to small to touch type. Frankly, the 5 to 6 inch range is probably only good for slates.
I agree...the keybd is useless. I find it easier to type on my PepperPad3 with chiclet 'split' keyboard than this. It's so small it (for me) is only useable as a thumb keyboard...but due to size this is unwieldy to do.
We bought two of these at my office. It's just awesome on the road. I developped a specific user interface for the U810 and the employees just love it. Can't say more!
Has there ever actually been a tablet that had a bad hinge? Everyone always looks at them and says "that hinge is going to be trouble" but I've never seen a problem.
People keep bringing that up. It may have been an issue years ago, but every tablet I've used in the last 3 years has been rock solid.
Weak hinges from a vendor would stand out in the tablet space and I'm sure reviewers/users would be very vocal about it.
Hudson! Run a bypass!
That's hysterical. Too good of a comment to simply "vote up," a beautifully concise, funny and insightful comment. Well done.
I ordered one of these for myself last month. I'm loving the portability. The only thing I find lacking is the HDD performance. Kinda wish it was SSD.
WTH is that?!
It's hideous.
Does that thing have some driver/hardware requirement that mandates that it use Vista? I think an upgrade to XP would make it a little snappier. Can it even run alternate OSes?
I think I'd start to miss my "tab" key.
The ears are new ... I wonder what they're for.
Oh - HSUPA. Duh - nevermind.
Drool on? That thang is FUGLY!
@Mark: The version that comes with Vista Business includes XP Tablet
2005 and rights to downgrade, which many of us have done. It runs very nicely.
@Lemmiwinks: I swapped the Esc key and the Tab mapping. Works much better now!
I can actually type about 40 wpm, which is much slower than my regular 75, but I don't care because the U810 is so portable. I do hope that besides adding HSUPA, they increase the RAM max past the current 1GB. It would also be nice is the SD and CF cards used the faster standard (SDIO?).
I've had one for a few months, running XP (mine doesn't have the ears) and my biggest complaint (like others) has been the keyboard. It was very popular while abroad. I guess it's not available in parts of Europe yet.
However, a friend decide to test the fingerprint sensor.. AND IT LET HIM IN. Not consistently, but more than once. This was a bit distressing.
I haven't tried swapping any keys yet, I much rather go for (unlikely to Ever happen) a full replacement. Dedicated arrow keys alone would make this thing more usable.