Customer Reviews

Fujitsu LifeBook U820 Mini Tablet PC - Intel Atom Z530 1.6GHz - 5.6" WXGA - 1GB DDR2 SDRAM - 120GB - Fast Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth - Windows Vista Business

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The u820 is really an impressive little machine with all of its great features and many big machine capabilities. As I am working with the machine I often think what a great idea Fujitsu had to pack so much into this form factor, then I occasionally think about that Fujitsu product manager or engineer that decided "oh 1GB of memory is enough". The machine really performs well most of the time and the memory is usually enough to handle most tasks as long as you don't really try to push it on the multitasking. Most apps run fine and the performance is quite snappy, then you'll get an interruption in the middle of your working where you don't have control over the memory and multitasking and that is where the danger sometimes lies.

I consider myself to be a pretty standard user scenario: using the browser, email, office, instant messaging and web conferencing. As a part of my standard apps for IM and web conferencing I use Office Communicator for my corporate access and unified communications and Live Messenger for my personal communications. I am sure my usage is fairly typical although using tools that may a little different than the norm. I use VOIP as my primary communication device making nearly all of my phone calls from it with a USB headset. I also use IM for sharing and presentation tool as my primary method of collaboration with colleagues around the world. My connectivity is mostly Wi-Fi from home office or coffee shops when within range of acceptable service and I use the built in 3G while on the road or at airports.

Tradeoffs

Let's get through some of these tradeoffs right up front since you can't expect an ultra-portable machine to be a complete laptop replacement. Although I think you can expect it to provide near 80-90% functionality for a given scenario (light weight machine for travel a machine on the go for short periods, etc.). You can expect that there are going to be some tradeoffs for price of performance, portability, battery life and integrated 3G to name a few. One of the obvious tradeoffs with the u820 is the 1gb of memory which can impact the way you work and of course the smaller keyboard which might be an issue for some depending on your tolerance for the smaller keys and change in key placement to accommodate the smaller form factor. Both of these can be tolerated for the tradeoffs in positives that this amazing little device has to offer.