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Review: Fujitsu U810 tablet PC

For this flawed masterpiece, a shock-haired mad scientist trained his shrink ray on a tablet PC, then ran shrieking from his creation when he tried to run HD video on it. It is nearly small enough, nearly powerful enough, and nearly cheap enough to be a no-brainer acquisition for anyone wanting an easy to port […]
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Rating:

7/10

WIRED
Small. Like Hobbit sized small. Decent battery life. Priced low. Pretty machine with smart construction. Full QWERTY keyboard fits perfectly into an extremely small area.
TIRED
Keyboard size comes at a cost: function mapping choices are practically demented in their layout. Fat battery. Not quite pocketable. Screen feels small in its wide bezel. Windows Vista Business? Gag.
  • RAM Size: 1 GB
  • Clock Rate: 800 MHz
  • Hard Drive Size: 40 GB
  • Screen Size: 5.6 inches
  • Screen Resolution: 1024 x 600 pixels

For this flawed masterpiece, a shock-haired mad scientist trained his shrink ray on a tablet PC, then ran shrieking from his creation when he tried to run HD video on it. It is nearly small enough, nearly powerful enough, and nearly cheap enough to be a no-brainer acquisition for anyone wanting an easy to port tablet sized notebook. Nearly.

Powered by an 800Mhz Intel A110 CPU and 1GB of RAM, the U810 has a 5.6-inch 1024 x 600 screen, a 40GB hard drive, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a fingerprint reader, and an impressive long-life battery. Hampering the device is a crappy webcam and the dull-as-dishwater Vista Business. Fujitsu is smart enough, though, to include a Windows XP disk for an OS swap. Video performance is average at best-it'll work as a portable media player, but not as well as, say, an Archos 604 Wi-Fi. There's no wireless broadband options either-you can add one yourself but it will tie up the only USB port. Still, there's a lot to love about the U810. It's highly efficient-the battery lasted more than four hours surfing the 'net and watching movies. Gaming isn't bad either, but we had to stick to graphically sparse titles. Playing shooters like Unreal Tournament proved to be maddening due to low frame rates and muddled colors.

But if you're rocking a machine with Windows Vista Business, then gaming is probably the last thing on your mind.