Fujitsu Lifebook P701 review

Fujitsu’s Lifebook P701 is an ultra-portable designed for business use, and comes with features for corporations, including a TPM module for secure encryption, and a SmartCard reader and fingerprint reader for secure login. However, some of the other business-oriented features also offer benefits to the average user, such as the ExpressCard slot, the non-reflective 12.1in screen and the copy of Windows 7 Professional.

The latter gives you more features than Home Premium, with support for older Windows XP applications and Remote Desktop, amongst other things. The ExpressCard slot, which supports the smaller 34mm cards, lets you add peripherals such as TV tuners or extra ports. The screen is intended for office environments, where bright strip-lighting will create annoying reflections on glossy screens.

The downside is that it also dulls colours, and has a fine grain that can spoil areas of uniform, light colour. It has a 16:10 aspect ratio rather than the more popular 16:9 aspect ratio of consumer laptop screens, with a resolution of 1,280×800. In practice there’s very little difference between the two aspect ratio and no clear advantage to either. We found colours to be natural, but dull, and contrast wasn’t great, although the backlight was bright and even.

In keeping with the business tone, the internal speakers were tinny and harsh, but loud and clear enough to convey spoken word, so they’re ideal for Skype or dictations, but not great for music or films.

The keyboard uses flat-topped keys that have a gap between them, but we found it cramped, mainly thanks to the wide, double-height Enter key and wide right Shift key. While each key’s action is light, with a bite at the top of the stroke, the keyboard flexes as a whole, dulling each strike and losing feedback that’s essential for touch-typists.

The touchpad is responsive but too small, and has two separate buttons with a light action. Next to the touchpad is a circular area that’s billed as a scrolling aid, despite the fact that the touchpad itself has a vertical scrolling area that is easier to use.

Overall build quality was great, apart from the soggy keyboard, and the design is more practical than stylish, as befits a business laptop. It’s rather thick, but surprisingly light at 1.6kg, and its battery lasted for over six hours in our light usage test, making it suitable for long commutes or short air journeys. It’s nowhere near as long-last as Acer’s TimelineX 1830T or Asus’s U31JG, however, which lasted for nine and ten hours respectively.

Performance from the new Sandy Bridge 2.1GHz Intel Core i3-2310M was good, and despite the laptop only having 2GB of RAM it performed the same as other laptops with the same chip with an overall score of 41. Still, having more RAM means you could load larger files and more applications, and with memory so cheap these days it seems churlish not to include 4GB as standard. You can buy an official 2GB module for an extortionate £92; a similar module from Crucial will cost £17. With its business credentials, we would have expected a longer warranty, although it’s a collect-and-return deal so preferable to the return-to-base warranties offered elsewhere.

With its pedestrian looks and uninspiring features, the P701 won’t set any hearts racing, but if you prefer its anti-glare screen or need Windows 7 Pro’s features, it’s a good choice. If you’re not too worried about mobility, the Lenovo ThinkPad L520 is less expensive, has a far superior keyboard and a more colourful screen.