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The good news is that you can reduce the resolution. You'll need to use the Intel Ultra Mobile GMA Driver control panel to do this, because Vista's display settings don't offer a stretch to fill the screen mode and thus leaves you with a big black border and still tiny text. In the Intel control panel, go to Display Settings and tap the Aspect Ratio button to select Full Screen (no border) mode when reducing resolution. 1024 x 600 (the U810's native resolution) works well for short periods of use if your eyes are good. Otherwise it's 800 x 480 to maintain the widesceen aspect ratio with no distortion. The bad news? We couldn't get the touch screen to calibrate when running at anything other than 1280 x 800. The U820 has a passive touch screen that's sharp, though not as sharp as the non-touch screen on the Sony Vaio P, and not as vibrant as the Vaio P or OQO model 02+. Sony's XBrite LED backlit display wins hands down on clarity and looks, but non-touch screens have a distinct advantage since they don't have an added digitizer layer on top of the LCD. The Fujitsu U820's display has adequate brightness but it's not super-bright at the max setting. That max setting is bright enough to allow for outdoor use, though there's lots of glare.
Top to bottom: Fujitsu LifeBook U820, Acer Aspire One and the Fujitsu P8020 12" notebook. As with a full size convertible tablet, the display is mounted to the body via a center swivel hinge that's robust (our U810's stayed sturdy and firm for a year). You can use the U like a miniature notebook or a tiny tablet PC with a swivel of the display. The touch screen works decently, but given the high resolution and resulting tiny targets on screen, using the included stylus rather than a finger results in fewer unregistered or incorrectly registered taps. Fujitsu includes Microsoft OneNote 2007, and excellent application that makes use of handwritten drawings and notes.
The Fujitsu is a convertible tablet. Here it is in tablet mode. The large battery makes for a handy grip in tablet mode. There's no room for a trackpad, so the U820 has a pointing stick on the upper right corner that's accessible in notebook and tablet modes. It's a small textured square rather than a tiny eraser stick nub, and the mouse left/right click buttons are located across the way on the upper left edge. For right handed folks this is a decent way to mouse around, but it's a torture for a leftie like me. The Fujitsu has only one USB port, and a USB mouse will tie that up. Better to use a Bluetooth mouse, and happily the U820 has Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR.
For the security minded, the U820, like the U810, has an Authentec fingerprint scanner with OmniPass software and a TPM. Computers this small are easy to lose and are powerful enough to carry lots of sensitive data, so we're happy to see the biometric security included standard. Touchy on Typing The notebook style keyboard is definitely a big step up from a thumb board, but touch typing requires slender and coordinated fingers. Most folks will do better typing with two index fingers. For such a small machine, key travel is good and there's a traditional oversized enter key and an elongated spacebar. The shift keys are reduced to single key width and there's not enough room for F1 through F12 keys, so F7-F12 double up with F1-F6 and require a press of the Fn key. For some reason, Fujitsu moved the period key that was located in a normal location on the U810: it's now to the right of the spacebar and that drove us bonkers.
Ports, Slots and Fans The LifeBook has 1 USB 2.0 port, 3.5mm headphone and mic jacks and a proprietary port for the dongle adapter that houses 10/100 Ethernet and VGA ports. There's a docking connector for the optional $80 dock that adds 4 USB 2.0 ports, VGA and Ethernet. The U820 has both SD and Compact Flash card slots. The CF card slot is handy for serious photographers who want to proof photos, but for anyone else, it's a wash. Though the machine has a low wattage CPU, there is indeed a fan that's generally quiet/off unless the machine is playing video or doing heavy lifting in Garmin Mobile. For a unit this small, the fan is louder than we'd have expected (as loud as a standard notebook's at low to mid speed), but not as loud as the famously noisy Aspire One.
Above: the front edge with the proprietary dongle port and LED indicators.
GPS A big thumbs up for the integrated GPS. It's not (for a change) part of a 3G modem and that means less fiddling with COM ports and turning wireless radios on and off. For those who do want 3G, Fujitsu offers an internal AT&T 3G HSUPA modem for $150 extra, though for some reason you can't get it in the base 60 gig HD model, only the 120 gig HD and SSD models which increases the cost of the radio in the end. The GPS (made by Kyocera according to Windows) manages to get a fix indoors near a window, and quickly at that. It gets a strong signal outdoors and is a fine companion for driving, though the tiny speaker could be louder to combat road noise. Fujitsu includes Garmin Mobile for maps and navigation, and it works similarly to Garmin's portable GPS models with easy to understand options and large, finger-friendly buttons. A car antenna (long wire with a magnetic puck at the end) is included, but reception was so good we had no need for it. Great for MS Office and the web, forget video As you'd expect from a tiny PC, especially one running Vista, the Fujitsu U820 isn't the kind of computer you'll use for serious gaming, programming or heavy Photoshop work. But it will work for light Photoshop work (editing 5 or fewer 8 meg images at a shot), MS Office, web browsing, Dreamweaver and music playback. The U820 runs Intel's second generation Atom processor, the 1.6GHZ Z530. It's significantly faster than the Intel A110 (Intel's first mass market CPU for little computers), but alas the Intel GMA 500 integrated graphics that accompany it hasn't impressed us. It can handle Aero on Vista, though Fujitsu ships the U820 with Aero's high end graphical effects turned off, but forget video playback. QVGA youtube videos barely play smoothly and video at higher resolutions and bitrates plays at 5 to 10 fps on average. This includes iTunes video which actually doesn't make use of the graphics processor and instead rely on the CPU. Odd that an Archos 5 and iPhone can do a much better job of video playback. Perhaps Intel will someday release drivers that improve performance but as it stands, the Fujitsu is fine as a portable music player but not as a video player. And yes, it's worse than the U810 running XP and the Vaio P (Vista) for video playback, though we wouldn't rate the P or U810 highly.
Fujitsu offers several LifeBook U820 configurations and all have the same hardware specs except the hard drive which is available in the base model at 60 gigs, 120 gigs for $250 more and a 64 gig SSD version that adds an absurd $1,100 to the base $1,049 price (as of 4/1/2009). We can't imagine why a 64 gig SSD drive should cost so much in 2009, and we find it hard to recommend spending that kind of money to double the price of the U820. In contrast, the Sony Vaio P is $899 with a 60 gig hard drive and $1,199 for the 64 gig SSD model-- a $300 upcharge. This is a shame since the U820's 4200 rpm ATA drive is a bottleneck at times. All models come with just 1 gig of DDR2 533MHz RAM (not upgradable), nearly all of which is used just booting into Vista. Speaking of Vista, the U810 shipped with Vista Home Premium or Vista Business with an XP Tablet Edition downgrade disc in the box. Windows XP made a great deal of sense on the 800MHz Intel A110 which was nearly brought to its knees by Vista. This time, likely due to pressure from Microsoft, Fujitsu offers only Windows Vista on their website. For companies ordering 25 or more U820 computers per year, Fujitsu will include a Windows XP Tablet Edition 2005 downgrade disc with Vista Business models. Some retailers have ordered this version, so XP is apparently available to consumers on the U820, but our Vista Business review unit did not ship with an XP disc. Vista runs adequately on the U820, so this isn't as much of a hardship as it would have been with the U810, but we expect it would really fly with XP. Windows Experience Score: Processor: 3.0 It might not be fast, but man it runs long! Don't knock that little Intel Atom CPU when it comes to power consumption. It uses just 2 watts! Compare that to the 25 watt Intel Core 2 Duo on the Sony Vaio Z500 series 13.3" notebooks and 65 watts for Intel's new quad core notebook CPU. Combine that with the extended capacity 5800mAh battery that comes standard with the U820 in the US and you've got a machine that runs 5.5 to 7 hours depending on power management settings and applications running. If you really dislike the battery hump and added weight, Fujitsu sells a more compact 2 cell battery separately. What we don't like is the rather large power brick. It's the same one used on the 12" Fujitsu P8020, and that's just too large and heavy for a tiny PC. Even Sony got the clue and shipped the Vaio P with an absolutely diminutive charger.
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