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4 out of 4 people found this review helpful
3.5 stars
"Very cool little machine with limitations"
Pros: Typical Fujitsu quality, flexibility, having access to all PC applications in small form factor
Cons: CF card reader problems
Summary: A very cool device. I?ve had it for about two months now. Primarily bought it for short business trips and hauling around the office to meetings. Having struggled with Vista on my daughter?s new laptop, I ordered it with XP. My primary laptop is a 13? Vaio SZ with a Core 2 processor, 2 mg RAM, and a 160 GB 7200 HD, so I have a good sense of mobile performance. The Fujitsu is fine for typical office applications, watching movies, but you?re not going to do any high performance graphics oriented computing on it. XP load times are slow as you would expect from a 4200 rpm HD. I typically leave the Fujitsu on ?standby? when not in use; a quick flip of the lid and it?s up and running in seconds. I can go all day with sporadic use this way; less if the wireless is on, but still good battery life. In fact, I purchased a second battery to take along for cross-country flights, and have yet to use it.
I love it on airplanes (I sit in the cheap seats, so any boneheads who recline their chairs had effectively prevented me from working on my other laptop). You can work with it in a standard laptop configuration (on the table with keyboard and screen), held in your hands, or as a tablet. I find I use all three at different times and different situations, sometimes switching in the middle of a task. I thought I would settle on one preferred style, but having the flexibility is nice.
Another surprise is how often I use the tablet. I?ve never used windows tablet before and my handwriting is terrible, but I?ve found the recognition software to be very robust. (Mind you, I still need to do some post note taking edits). I now use it for note taking in meetings which was an unexpected application for me.
Like dougwf I find the wireless signal deteriorates over intermediate distances that my VAIO handles with aplomb.
I have never been able to consistently use fingerprint readers ? I end up swiping my thumb and every other finger multiple times before getting anything readable. The Fujitsu was no exception so I unloaded the software.
The screen is crisp and gorgeous but I am a middle aged guy with reading glasses and trust me, you will need your reading glasses as well. However, this is the price you pay for the form factor. If you haven?t worked with small form machines before, realize that any task will take longer only because keyboard maneuvers are more intricate, and a stylus cannot match the performance of a mouse.
One of the major problems is the CF card reader. Having a built in CF reader was a major selling point for me. My thinking was that a few 16 mb cards in my pocket would readily compensate for the small 40 GB hard drive. But the U810 cannot handle high capacity, high speed cards. Apparently the highest read and write speed are around 2MB/s so it?s really a useless appendage. Even at that speed, I can only access a fraction of the files I have on the card. Very disappointed.
This has been a major issue raised on other forums and from what I gather, Fujitsu is struggling to develop a fix.
see http://www.umpcportal.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=1743&viewmode=flat&order=ASC&start=0
Hard drive runs hot ? in the 40-50+ degree C range, depending on amount of HD access.
Build quality is very good. I?ve owned Fujitsu before and they are consistently well built machines. Contrary to one of the other reports about poor service, I?ve found their call centers to be responsive.
