William Maher27 February 2008, 11:06 PM
The big battle in notebook land right now is to be the thinnest, and Fujitsu’s contender is this 13.3in model with the tagline ‘stylish mobility’.
This is a solid machine and it’s a true portable, with a 1.66kg starting weight (our test unit was about 1.8kg) and the latest technology, including a backlit LED screen and 1GB Turbo memory.
The performance is OK, but it’s no screamer, considering the price. In our PCMark05 benchtest the Fujitsu cranked out a score of 3,552. Compare this to the 13.3in Dell XPS M1330 we reviewed last month — a similarly sized unit which blitzed the Fujitsu with a PCMark score of 5,408. The Dell was more expensive at $2,899, but the performance is in a different league.
Price aside, Fujitsu has the right idea. The 6410 is small enough but isn’t hobbled in raw grunt like its tiny sub-1kg cousins. Onboard is Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 2GHz, Mobile Intel 965 Express Chipset (Intel GMA X3100 graphics), 100GB HDD, though only 1GB RAM.
The Turbo Memory is unique to Intel’s new Centrino lineup and utilises flash memory to save on hard drive use (by caching frequently accessed data) and to complement existing RAM (ReadyBoost). Performance and battery gains are said to vary, but it can’t hurt.
Battery life of two hours, 16 minutes in our DVD rundown test didn’t break any records, although keep in mind we used the standard battery. We found the system ran to roughly three and a half hours for ‘normal’ usage like web browsing and music — that’s with the Wi-Fi on, power saver mode on and sleep settings disabled.