Digital Home Thoughts: Stunning Mobility and Battery Life with the Fujitsu P5010D

Room For Improvement? Sure!
Beyond the glitches above, the P5010D does exactly what it says it will do, and as long as you keep in mind the inherent limitations of a laptop this size, you won’t be disappointed. However, there’s room for improvement, and in future versions of the 5000 series I’d like to see Fujitsu do the following:

• Include a 3.5mm male headphone adaptor that ends in twin RCA female jacks – this would allow connection to a TV set or DVD player right out of the box. An S-Video cable is already included, so why not this adaptor? Give customers a more complete experience right out of the box.

• RCA audio outputs! This laptop is chock-full of multimedia options (USB 2.0, Firewire, memory card slots, S-Video out, VGA out), but lacking RCA audio out. Granted, this is something I've never seen on any laptop, so perhaps there's a reason for that. 

• Although the 900Mhz CPU is snappy enough, I’d like to see faster processors offered in future versions, like the 1.4 Ghz Pentium 4-M. Something just felt very wrong about buying a laptop two and a half years after my previous laptop, and having it only be 150 Mhz faster. I know that, per clock cycle, the Pentium 4-M is much faster than a Pentium 3 or Pentium 4, but consumers won’t understand that. Even if the cost is slightly less battery life, a faster CPU would be welcome.

• A faster hard drive. The 4200 RPM 40 GB hard drive is a little on the pokey side – assuming the power and thermal issues can be brought under control, I’d very much like to see a 5400 or even 7200 RPM drive. But if the faster drive were to severely impact battery life, I'd opt for a 4200 RPM drive.

• A DVD burner! In this market, most laptops have an option for a DVD burner (usually DVD-R), so it was unfortunate not to have that choice on the P5010D. I’m hoping they’ll release it as an accessory in the future.

• The audio control seems to be Windows-based now, rather than low-level hardware based, which means you can’t mute the audio until after you’ve logged into Windows. If you have a startup sound, this means you’ll disrupt those around you, which I’ve unfortunately had happen several times since buying this laptop. The only solution is to go into the control panel and change the Windows Start-up sound to “none”. On my older E-Series Lifebook, the audio could be muted as the notebook was booting up. On the up side, when the laptop audio is muted, it makes no sound, even when going into standby or hibernate mode (my E-Series would emit a loud “beep” when it entered standby mode, even when the audio was muted).

All in All, Still a Dream Laptop
Despite my suggestions for improvement, the Fujitsu P5010D is the most useful laptop I've ever owned. The small size and long battery life have allowed me to take it with me more than any other laptop I've owned, and that means being even more productive. I heartily recommend this laptop for anyone who's primary goal is mobility and long battery life.

Oct. 13th Update: One of my pet peeves with this laptop that I neglected to mention is the VGA dongle. In order to hook the laptop up to an external projector, you need to bring a small dongle. The problem is, because the battery life is so awesome, I never think to bring anything with me when I go teach a class - I just put the laptop in a slipcase, and off I go. Three times I've forgotten to bring the VGA dongle and I've had to transfer my presentation to my USB Flash drive to get it onto the computer in that room, while my laptop sits there doing nothing. I would have greatly preferred to have had a real VGA port directly on the laptop.