ETU4 offers over previous

ETU4 offers over previous

Welcome to a laptop battery specialist of the Fujitsu Laptop Battery

The laptop's lid flips open fairly easily to reveal a brushed aluminium interior paired with a black chiclet keyboard. Overall, the interior of the ETU4 reminds us very much of Apple's MacBook line, and we would not be surprised at all to hear of people mistaking the two laptops — at least from the front-on view — at a casual glance. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, as the saying goes — or did Apple originally steal this design from HP or someone else? It's hard to know, although we suspect Apple had this one first.

The trackpad is decently sized, and there's a speaker grill below the ETU4′s screen, along with the Beats Audio logo. On the laptop's left-hand side you get an Ethernet port, which we're a huge fan of, as they're growing rarer on laptops these days, plus a HDMI port, two USB 3.0 ports and an SD card slot. There's also a couple of lights to show the hard drive accessing and another LED which is on when the laptop's with battery like Fujitsu FPCBP175 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP198 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP234 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP262 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP263 Battery, Fujitsu LifeBook PH520 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP155 Battery, Fujitsu LifeBook T4210 Battery, Fujitsu LifeBook T4220 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP268 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP59 Battery, Fujitsu LifeBook E7110 Battery on and cycling on and off when it's off. On the laptop's right-hand side sits its power input, which is modestly-sized, plus another USB port, headphone and microphone jacks and a small port for Kensington locks.

Now, despite explicitly carrying the 'Ultrabook' marketing label, we'd be very hard-pressed to fit the ETU4 into this category. It's not thin — in fact, it's quite thick at 2cm, and it's not light, weighing in at 2.1kg. This feels like a traditional heavy laptop in every sense of the word. For reference, Apple's 13″ MacBook Air is 800g lighter at 1.35kg — and even its 15″ MacBook Pro with its Retina Display is lighter at 2.02kg. This isn't the sort of laptop you're going to feel comfortable carrying around in your bag all day every day — it's more of a fixed sort of machine.

The key feature which the ETU4 offers over previous models is its touchscreen, built to take advantage of Windows 8. And it's the real deal — it feels just like a tablet. You can swipe from the edge in to bring up Windows 8′s menus, you can pinch to zoom and scroll with a flick of the finger. It's all here and it's all touchscreen-y. Unfortunately it runs at a maximum resolution of 1366×768, which we consider a little low. But if you're looking to dive in and test Windows 8 in a laptop form factor, you can definitely do this with the ETU4. Windows 8 performs pretty much as expected on this model.

The rest of the ETU4′s features are more or less along standard lines for a moderately well-featured laptop in late 2012. You get 4GB of RAM, an Intel Core i3 CPU running at 1.8GHz, a 5400RPM 300GB SATA hard disk, an Intel HD 4000 model graphics card, 802.11 W-Fi (b/g/n), Bluetooth and so on. Basically all of the features which you would expect from a mid-range laptop at this point are here, although none are top of the range. HP rates the battery life of the laptop at up to seven hours and fifteen minutes.