Saturday, May 20, 2006

Hugo Ortega plays with Fujitsu T4020


I announced several posts back that I’d been handed a Fujitsu T4020 Convertible Tablet PC. Today, although not intended as a full review, I decided to posts some thoughts.

I must disclose that my original purpose for having this device was somewhat selfish. Since I’d been handed the role as blogger for the CeBIT Australia Fair I knew that my primary dilemma in accomplishing this task would be my love for the slate pc. I hunted and looked through my piles of Tablets to only realise that I have a rather refined Slate fetish; the only convertible/hybrid I own is a HP TC1100 which would definitely be under-processed and under-sized for the task.

David at Fujitsu answered my call rather enthusiastically with the delivery of a “Brand New” T4020 Convertible Tablet PC that had been sitting in the office and designated as a “Emergency Only” Tablet… I peeled open the boxes, and layers of insulation, to find what at first site appears to be a rather good attempt at post-modern Tabletism. The reason I term it post-modern is that Fujitsu’s design team has gone to considerable effort to create a funky machine; with its rounded edges and two-toned grey/silvers it seems that Fujitsu colour coordinators have definitely done away with PC Beige as a preferred hue.

Booting the T4020 quickly gives the Tableteer a glimpse of great things to come…speed (impressive for an Intel® Pentium® M Processor 750 1.86GHz, 2MB L2 cache, 533MHz FSB) ! As we all know faster is better, right? In this case absolutely, positively better. From the word GO this Tablet screams. Gone are all the proprietary software bits that make very good computers run like dogs, i.e. infamous with IBM and Sony VAIO. When I first booted this device I was pleasantly surprised to find myself in the Windows environment well before many more fabled machines. One Windows Mobile fanatic friend of mine pointed out a very ironic little quirk in this device just recently: “stupid isn’t it that the fingerprint scanner is located on the body of the computer and not the screen? What if I want to swipe my finger when in Tablet mode?”

All-in-all the keyboard feels great and the weight/functionality ratios are all tipped in the favour of the T4020. I like it so far but stay tuned for a more comprehensive Video Review later next week.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Hugo!

I think that was me you quoted about the fingerprint scanner.

I guess I've been spolit by the excellent Fujitsu P1510 which has the finegerprint scanner at the side of the screen.

If only P1510 memory upgrade wasn't so expensive, and it had a higher resolution display, then it would be the ultimate device for me.

Oh, and am I really a fanatic? :-)

Cheers,
Kean

Hugo Gaston Ortega said...

Hey Kean,

It absolutely was you mate. Fear of prosecution from the privacy police kept me from revealing your true identity though!!!

Love your little P1510 and won't it be great when we get them 3G enabled?

Keep up the great work mate, you Uber Fanatic You!

Anonymous said...

Hugo, what is it about your site that IE 7 Beta 2 does not like? The site keeps crashing every now and then.

Cheers,
Steven Snell.

Hugo Gaston Ortega said...

Hi Steven,

Nice to hear from you and thank you for the feedback. In short..."I don't know mate." The only thing I can think of is something buggy with YouTube.com enbedded media player??? It runs the latest version of Flash, perhaps causing issues. Other than that the site is really running "out-of-the-box" gear. Sorry mate, keep me updated, and I'll look into it from here.

Thanks for taking your valueable time out to tell me.

The Miniature Mage said...

Hugo, please help me out here. I really need to know how Age of Empires III runs on that in an 8-player LAN game :D

Oh, and if you want to cover the Weight-Saver option, you go right ahead. No pressure on yon or anything, but I think you just found my next TabletPC (but I'm making myself wait until next year; the UMPC will be this year's purchase).

Hugo Gaston Ortega said...

Hey Miniature Mage,

Nice to hear from you again. You really made me laugh, it seems as though Rob Bushway, JK and I are gonna have to feature multi-player game scanarios to prove just how good these new Tablet PC's are.

Stay tuned...not for 8 player game sessions, but for my review! LOL