Review of the Fujitsu P1610
I bought a refurb P1610 from Fujitsu's store (sold through eBay) because the next generation P1620 is barely different (dual core instead of single core processor) and because, at $850, it is half the price of the new model. The P1610 has 1GB of RAM, a 1.2 GHz processor, and a 60GB hard drive. The things I really like about it
  • Very Portable: 9.5" by 7" (includes extended battery) by 1", 2 pounds.
  • High definition 1280 x 768 pixel nine inch screen, which I am running at 1024 x 600 to reduce eyestrain
  • A trackpoint instead of a touchpad
  • Touch-typeable keyboard if you have skinny fingers
  • 4 hours of real battery life (extended battery)
While not so important, it is nice that too that the power brick is quite small as these things go and that you can buy extra batteries and power bricks from Hong Kong at fairly modest prices compared to competing units.
It is less important to me that the P1610 is a convertable tablet and indeed, since the IBM X61t is so slow (even with the 5400 RPM hard drive) compared to an X31, I had a back up plan of installing the regular XP on the P1610 and just turning off the tablet features, but in fact this machine isn't slow at all. I've used the usual trick (thanks to Blackviper!) and disabled a lot of services, and the machine runs briskly, boots in 65 seconds, which is only 5 seconds worse than my stripped down IBM X31, without the disk saver, tablet utilities, etc. that have to load on this machine. I enter the password at 50 seconds from pushing start, and can click on my documents 10 seconds later.

First Impressions: Even after two days I am already touch-typing with few mistakes; the big one is that control and delete aren't where I expect. Still, this is completely do-able. Battery life seems good 4 hours - even on full brightness, but using the extended battery. The trackpoint isn't as precise as the Thinkpads and one must turn the click-with-pointer off because otherwise there are many random clicks.

In a quiet environment the P1610 is noisier than I expected. Not terrible, but the fan noise is much more noticeable than on the IBM Thinkpads. As I understand it, air is sucked into the keyboard and vented out the back. It is also fairly warm. Not hot, like some machines, but not cool either.

No crapware came with the P1610. While I turned off some of it -- thumbprint login, automatic driver updater, dialkeys, and the Atheros client to operate the wireless (I find the native Windows XP unit works fine for me) -- there were no crippled versions, useless helpers and trial subscriptions, a pleasant surprise these days.

THe fit and finish is at best OK. It is plastic and fairly cheap looking plastic at that. It doesn't have the beauty of a Sony or Apple or even the well-made professional look of a Thinkpad. It has more of the Dell look to me. The silver and black is, well, not attractive.

The screen is beautiful and reasonably visible in direct sunlight. Indeed, it is indirect sunlight that poses the greatest challenge because it is very reflective. Indoors the screen is beautiful compared to a Thinkpad, very sharp, like a superb photograph. The keyboard action is excellent, with responsive and smooth travel.

A good site for information is Leog.