Gottabemobile reviewing the Fujitsu U810

A while ago I was posting here about the Fujitsu U810 and I was saying that I was not completely satisfied with this UMPC. Today Rob from Gottabemobile posted his first impressions about the Fujitsu U810, check them and compare my impressions with his.

• The keyboard is most useful when thumbing; after a while, though, that in itself gets tiring because the keyboard is too wide to use comfortably. It reminds me of Sony's UX series. OQO's keyboard, by contrast, is much smaller and more suited for thumbing. I find the U810's keyboard too small for even touch typing while the unit is resting on a table.
• Because the keyboard is so small, Fujitsu had to sacrifice some dedicated keys. Some of those sacrifices are the dedicated arrow down / up keys. For example, to scroll a web page, the function key has to be depressed while pressing the arrow down key, and I have yet to find a way to Page Down / Page Up.  The other major sacrifice is only one Shift key, which makes capitalizing words difficult with letters on the left side of the keyboard. The U810 does not support sticky keys natively, relying on Vista's support of sticky keys. They are not as quick to use as OQO's native sticky keys that get activated with two depresses rather than five, and are easily turned on / off.
• As the first Vista based Intel 800 MHz system I've used, the performance is more than acceptable and much better than I anticipated.
• The keyboard light is pretty cool, but I'd prefer a backlit keyboard.
• Inking is a mess - Fujitsu did not implement the palm rejection technology they used in the P1610. What a shame. 
• It is very, very light
• I like the included Compact Flash and SD slots. I miss that in my OQO Model 02.
• I really like the mechanical volume control, which is also accessible in slate mode.

As you can see, both of us had issues with the keyboard design and size and we both liked the Compact and SD slots.

Fujitsu U810 Review

I have waited about a week since I returned back the Fujitsu U810 to Alltp.com  to write this review. And the reason is simple, I want to write a fair review.  I have been fortunately enough to have reviewed the latest two Tablet PCs from Fujitsu, the P1610 and the T2010. These two Tablet PCs left a very good impression on me because of their build quality and performance. But the Fujitsu U810 was different. For the first time I was  on front of a UMPC that I thought that I would like and it was all the contrary.

But what were my issues with this machine? In two words: Performance and Design.

Performance

The unit checked had a processor A110 running at 800 MHz with a graphic chipset 945, 1 Gb of RAM and Vista Installed. And this is the first disappointment, in my opinion, this processor is not good enough for Vista. While it has a chipset capable of handling Aero, the inclusion of these processors in UMPCs that use just 1Gb of RAM and super slow hard driver at 4800 RPM makes a hardware combination that results in a very poor Vista performance. And that's what I found in the U810, a very poor Vista Performance compared to my Q1 with a Celeron at 900 MHz and 2 Gb of RAM.

The use of a A110 processor could have brought to the U810 one advantage: a better Battery Life than if Fujitsu has used a Pentium or Celeron on this unit.  But here is a problem, to make this UMPC smaller Fujitsu used on it a Lithium ion; 4-cells, 7.2V, 5200mAh extended battery with a battery life of a little more than 4 hours. The same battery life that I'm getting in my Q1 using a hungry Celeron M at 900 MHz with a display technology less advanced than the one used in the Fujitsu. So, the only advantage on using a A110 processor in the Fujitsu U810 was gone in favor of trying to keep the unit smaller. If you try to buy the U810 today with its original 2 cell battery you wont find it anywhere because that battery has a battery life of around 2 hours. And that battery life was big time criticized in the first generation of UMPC.

The battery life under Windows XP should be around 20 minutes more. And the performance a lot better. If your are planning to buy this device I would recommend to get one with XP. If the unit that I tested would have had XP, everything that I have wrote in this article  so far won't have any sense. According to some news, Fujitsu is shipping a Windows XP CD in the units loaded with Vista Business. That will give you the chance to go back to XP if you find your experience as disappointed as mine was.

I can post the numbers from my benchmarks tests in this point but I do not feel that those are needed. I'm sure that by now you have heard thousand times that Vista runs better in 2 Gb of RAM or greater so even with a better processor still the performance would not be that good. So... Get it with XP and you will have a really good experience -from the point of view of performance - with this machine.

Design

Lets start saying that when I opened the Fujitsu U810 box I was really surprised to see how small this device was.

But with a little bit of research I found that in fact, the U810 is the biggest at the smallest UMPC available at this moment.

This size makes impossible to fit the device in any jacket pocket. But what's a disadvantage for some could be an advantage, in that bigger body a keyboard could have easily became a touch type keyboard, one that could have been used with all the fingers. But that was not the case, Fujitsu lost this boat for just half of a inch.

The above picture shows the Fujitsu U810 close to a Jornada 720, the smallest device where I have been able to use the keyboard efficiently with all my fingers. Now you can see why I said that Fujitsu missed this opportunity for just half of an inch.

But I found another problem with the Fujitsu U810 Keyboard, the keys location.

To put a keyboard in that reduced space, Fujitsu combined some of the keys functionalities. This has been done before many times and by many companies. But this is the first time that I have found the Tab Key paired to the Space Key. To use the Tab you have to hold the Function key down and then tap in the space key. If you are using the U810 filling a database you will find this uncomfortable. Another combination of keys that extremely bothered me was with the Arrows keys. The same thing, to use them you have to use the Fn key held down.

Other than that, the keyboard was evidently designed for "Thumb typing". A guy like me used to "Touch Typing" will find the device hard to use. Younger generations that are used to "Thumb Type" text messages in their phones will find the device perfect. But to me, to have designed a device like a convertible to use it for "Thumb Typing" does not make too much sense and for that use I find the OQO 02 design better.

The Sound on this device was poor and coming from just one speaker.

The processor fan was a little bit noisy and the unit ran warm. The Samsung Q1 runs a lot cooler while the Amtek T700 runs a lot hotter.

What I like from the Fujitsu U810?

I liked the screen, it was brighter than the one in the oldest generation of UMPC. To have a SD card reader is a big plus too. The inclusion of a finger reader could be a very good security  feature for some. The fact that the device is a convertible that could be used in Tablet PC mode is something that in my opinion saves some of the inefficiencies in the keyboard.

While The Fujitsu P1610 and the Fujitsu T2010 have a score in my ratings of 9 out of 10, the Fujitsu U810 gets a 7.

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Vista Aero in a Fujitsu U810

Some of you have asked me to shoot some videos of applications running on the Fujitsu U810. So, what better sample than Aero!

 I did not optimize this UMPC at all and I found that it skips frames when playing video at high bibrates. This could be probably fixed with a few optimizing touches and upgrading some drivers.

[The device for this video was sent by ALLTP]

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Short video review about the Fujitsu U810

At todoUMPC.com I publish a short video every weekend talking about anything relative to UMPCs. This weekend the video was about the Fujitsu U810. All videos at todoUMPC are in Spanish but this weekend I did something special, I prepared a version of this weekend video with English Subtitles.

Link at Youtube.

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The Fujitsu U810 in 21 pictures

I always try to capture a set of pictures of the device I'm reviewing, these pictures often says more than 1000 words and many users have sent me emails thanking me because they have found there details that they never saw in other pictures. So here is the Fujitsu U810 in 21 pictures.

The Fujitsu U810 on these pictures was sent to me by ALLTP. The only company with a 48 hours Demo Program.

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To UMPC Makers, please, do not reinvent the wheel.

I know that by asking this I put myself in a very uncomfortable position of receiving an answer of "We reinvent the wheel because we can" but after a lot of thinking I decided that somebody has to say it. If the Fujitsu U810 was just one centimeter wider then the keyboard would have became a useful keyboard. And here is the proof and here is why I said, please, do not reinvent the wheel, please use the experience of other in this field.

 The above two pictures show the Fujitsu U810 and the HP Jornada 720 Handheld. As you can see the Jornada is about One Centimeter wider. And that one centimeter wider made the difference between having a touch keyboard and a none touch keyboard. For those who do not understand what touch keyboard means in this case, it means that you can type with all your fingers touching the keyboard. And that's the only efficient method of using a keyboard. And when I say efficient I mean, the possibility of reaching speeds of more than 50 words per minutes with the less possible effort. With just one centimeter more this machine would have had a lot more potential buyers than all you have now Fujitsu. I have to be honest, any serious executive will die for a device like this one but one where they can type fast. And that was one of the powerful points of those Jornadas from HP. Unfortunately, the Jornada did not have a Operating System capable of handling all the executives needs and that was the major reason why HP dropped that project.

Talking about writing... Did somebody at Fujitsu really thought that you can write using that small stylus? And it's not just small, it's the most uncomfortable stylus that I have ever held in my life.  

 

 The above picture shows the Fujitsu U810/U1010 stylus on top, and the Jornada 720 Stylus, the best stylus I have ever used in all the Pocket PC, Palm, SmartPhones, Handhelds and UMPCs that I have owned, used or reviewed. And believe me, the list is large.

Once again, why to reinvent the wheel? Just because you can? Well, just because you can does not make you smarter, do you know that? I know that there was a lot of pressure from the market asking for keyboards in UMPCs and I know that now as consequence the market is full of almost useless keyboards but if you have the chance of making it right then why don't you try.

I'll keep writing about this device sent by Alltp in the next few days, including of course a formal review. So stay tuned!

 

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How big is the Fujitsu U810?

The Fujitsu U810 size really impressed me. I don't know why but all pictures that I have seen of this UMPC gave me a wrong idea about its size. I was expecting to see a bigger device, smaller than my Q1 of course, but bigger. And I was totally wrong. Here are 4 pictures that illustrate how big is the Fujitsu U810.

Click on top of the picture to zoom it.

The battery in the first picture is a AAA battery, just in case you thought treat it was the bigger AA. In the other 3 pictures you can see it with a Dell Axim x51v Pocket PC.

I will be posting more details about this UMPC sent by Alltp in the next few days. So, stay tuned!

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Where is the U810?!

Sandisk 32 Gb SSD on Fujitsu U810 UMPC

More and more SSD drives are coming to markets so prices and availability is getting better. You should still be careful as some drives are too big for some UMPCs.

Our friend JKK has published a very interesting article where he shows that the SSD could be bigger than the regular 1.8" HDD and how you can make it fit in your UMPC in case you run into this case.

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What's gonna be my next victim?

I still working in the Everun review and I just got the confirmation about the UMPC that will become the next victim under my magnifying glass: The Fujitsu U810 sent by Alltp.com

So this is the time to ask what do you want to know about this first UMPC from Fujitsu.

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Fujitsu U810 UMPC video reviews

If you are thinking about buying the Fujitsu U810 then you should check this video review from a Gottabemobile forum member who owns one: 

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What Craig Pringle thinks about Fujitsu U1010

Craig Pringle is a MVP in Tablet PCs, that said, his opinion about the Fujitsu U1010 is in one word, valuable.   

Over all the U1010 is a very usable device.  There is a lot packed into this tiny package and every aspect of the design shows that it has been carefully thought out.  The price is very reasonable and performance is surprisingly snappy.  All told a solid offering.

In my opinion the U1010 could be a very good UMPC for many. The main reason is the design which has been proven to work in Tablet PCs. I would prefer to see on it a little more powerful processor and an extra USB port but... Nobody is perfect.

Technorati Tags: Fujitsu

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Fujitsu U810 UMPC posing for Linda A. Epstein

Linda does not stop to amaze me. In every review her pictures become better than the ones in the previous one. This time she is writing about the Fujitsu U810.  

This handy Ultra Mobile PC weighs a mere 1.56 pounds and is roughly the size of a paperback novel.  In fact if it were not for the battery it would be smaller than a paperback, which means it is both small enough and light enough to take with you anywhere you go.   Don't let the small size fool you, the Fujitsu U810 UMPC is packed with features that let you do anything and everything you need to do, where ever you happen to be.

I'm expecting to have soon one of this machine to put it under my magnifying glass which means to find the truth behind the 5.5 hours battery life claimed by Fujitsu, to run run some keyboard speed tests and of course to run tons of benchmarks. I have to say that if it was not because I know for fact that a 5 inches display does not go well with poor vision I would say that this is a perfect machine for me. The only other thing I would change is the processor for some more... potent. But that's me, for rest, the 99.99 % of all users the A110 is probably good enough.

Technorati Tags: FUJITSU

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Fujitsu LifeBook U810 Tablet PC Review by LAPTOP Magazine

Laptop Magazine gave the Fujitsu Lifebook U810 also known as U1010 3.5 starts out of 5. 

The first clamshell convertible in a UMPC form factor, Fujitsu's LifeBook U810 is a strong contender in a growing field, despite some quirks. We're still apprehensive about this mini-PC category, and we'd like to see a mobile broadband option, but at only $999, the U810 has a lot to offer highly mobile users who are in the market for a companion to a primary PC

I also think that a broadband option should be a mandatory feature in the UMPC category.

Technorati Tags: U810

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