Stylistic 5010

Stylistic 5010

Welcome to a laptop battery specialist of the Fujitsu Laptop Battery

The Stylistic 5010 isn't the first Fujitsu-Siemens tablet we've seen; the Stylistic 4121 had that honour. But what sets the new model apart is its Centrino heart, the first true tablet (as opposed to convertible notebook) we've seen to incorporate the trio of Pentium M, 855GM chipset and Intel 802.11b wireless adaptor, with all the promise of performance and battery like Fujitsu Lifebook C2310 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP85 Battery, Fujitsu LifeBook P7010 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP86 Battery, Fujitsu FMVNBP118 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP69 Battery, Fujitsu Lifebook P5020 Battery, Fujitsu Lifebook P5010 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP49 Battery, Fujitsu Lifebook P1030 Battery, Fujitsu LifeBook P1630 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP164Z Battery life that confers. The Pentium M is a 1GHz variant; not the fastest model around, but results in our application benchmarks are perfectly respectable. More importantly, battery life has improved, with the 5010 managing five hours in our light-use test.

The new model, with its 12.1in screen, has changed little save for the leaner dimensions. It's a little longer and marginally wider than a sheet of A4 paper, and admirably thin at a uniform 20mm. But even so, the 1.6kg weight means the problem of cradling it in one arm and writing with the other will give you neck and arm ache in short order. The 5010 is much better used on a desk in the manner of a normal writing pad, particularly since its back gets uncomfortably warm when used on your lap for longer periods.

Externally, there's little manufacturers can do to make tablet PCs different from each other; the writing-slate form factor precludes any design flourishes. The Fujitsu is limited to an array of six buttons along one side, four of which handle Enter and Escape functions, display orientation toggling and launching email, with Alt and Fn buttons doubling up the functions. Two more rocker-type switches act as cursor and page up/down controls.

The problems of pen input remain: the Windows GUI wasn't designed for anything other than mouse input, and the bolt-on compensations are less than perfect. No matter how much the pen settings are fiddled with, failing to lift the pen cleanly after a click often results in the system thinking you're trying to drag when you're not.

Despite its slim form, the tablet is well endowed with interfaces and connectors, sporting two USB 2 ports, FireWire, 10/100 Ethernet and 56K modem, plus audio jacks. The top edge has SD Card and PC Card slots, too. We can't help feeling that slimming down on some of the connectors would make for a sleeker unit, especially since there's a docking station that replicates all bar the expansion slots and the microphone connector (albeit for an extra £254). The docking station is also fitted with a CD-RW/ DVD-ROM combo drive and VGA connectors.

While they've certainly come down in price - the ST4121 was £500 more - tablets are still too steeply priced for most users. Despite the hype, tablet computing isn't a mobile computing panacea. For most applications, a notebook with a keyboard and mouse is still a faster and more practical way to work. For niche vertical applications there are benefits but, given the restricted utility of the unit when undocked, and the fact that it weighs - and costs - as much as a subnotebook, there are still few reasons to choose a pure tablet design.