Fujitsu, Toshiba, and HP business laptop roundup

Just to prove that we're not all play and no work, here's a little roundup of the new business laptops that Toshiba, HP, and Fujitsu are hawking.

Fujitsu offers the new Lifebook E8000 (pictured at right), which starts at a very arbitrarily priced $1,569, and comes with the standard features: 1.6 GHz Pentium M processor, a modest 30GB hard drive, and a 15-inch display. It weighs in at a manageable 7 pounds with its DVD drive.

Toshiba has a couple of updates to their Satellite series, the A70 and the A60. The better equipped of the two offerings, the A70, features an ATI Mobility 9000 graphics card, Mobile Pentium 4 processor, a 15.4-inch widescreen display, and starts at $1,499. The lower end A60 features the Mobility Radeon 7000 graphics card, a 15-inch display,
and starts at $1,099.  Unfortunately both notebooks weigh in at a quite chubby 8 pounds — more than you'll want to be carrying on your shoulder through an airport each week.

With all its overzealous features, HP's new Compaq Business Notebook nx9500 is definitely the powerhouse of the bunch. So much so, in fact, that it might qualify as another one of those why-is-it-a-laptop laptops, with a 17-inch display, 60GB hard drive, and a 3 GHz Pentium 4 processor.  Unfortunately, the extra heat shields required for HP
to market this machine as "Twice as fast as a 1.6 GHz Pentium M!" bring the nx9500 to a positively obese 9.5 pounds.