Tablet PC Review: Fujitsu LifeBook T4410

iPad? Please. Long before Apple's new tablet was a gleam in Steve Jobs's eye -- even before Bill Gates told us in 2002 that the Tablet PC was destined to replace the notebook computer -- Fujitsu was on the front lines of tablet computing, primarily in places such as hospitals where workers carried tablets instead of clipboards to fill out forms and check inventories.

Over the years, Fujitsu has taken more and more aim at the enterprise hardware market, particularly with Tablet PC convertibles -- laptops whose screens swivel to fold back over the keyboard, creating a tablet. The LifeBook T4410 ($1,969 as tested) is its most versatile convertible to date, because not only does it have both notebook and tablet operating modes but the latter is a two-way tablet, with a dual digitizer to respond both to its special stylus pen and to multitouch fingertip gestures.

The result is the smartest touch screen we've seen: It lets you use the stylus for precise input such as filling in check boxes, sketching, or handwriting recognition, then use gestures such as pinching and zooming or scrolling with two fingers. About our only gripes are that, even with the preinstalled Windows 7 Professional with Touch Pack, there are only a limited number of gestures you can make, and that -- while it starts at a reasonable $1,299 with the dual-digitizer display -- the T4410 gets pricey as you climb toward our $1,969 test model.

Two Digitizers, Two Screens

Actually, the Fujitsu starts at $1,199 with only the active digitizer (just stylus, no fingertip input); Intel's 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo T6670 processor; 2GB of RAM; a 160GB hard disk; and a 12.1-inch screen with 200 nits of brightness and approximately 90-degree vertical and horizontal viewing angles. In addition to the multitouch screen or second digitizer, our test unit was configured with an enhanced LCD with 300 nits of brightness and broader (about 160-degree) viewing angles.

The extra brightness helps, since screens with digitizers are inherently a bit dimmer than plain panels, and the broader viewing angles make it a little easier to see the display outdoors -- the 1,280 by 800-pixel screen is quite legible on cloudy days and close to first-class indoors, though like most backlit LCDs it's still impossible to read in direct sunlight.

The multitouch gestures you can make on screen are the same ones that work with some recent laptops' multitouch touchpads, including zooming -- spreading two fingers apart to zoom in or pinching them together to zoom out of images or Web pages -- and rotating -- using two fingers as the center and radius of a circle to pivot images.

With a little practice in Microsoft Surface Collage -- one of the Touch Pack applets that lets you arrange and manipulate photos -- the gestures feel intuitive enough to make you wish for more. Fujitsu provides a touch-screen program launcher as an alternative to Win 7's own Taskbar, but we're sure the in-house application writers and vertical-market programmers of the tablet computing community will be able to come up with ingenious combinations of fine-point (stylus) and fat-point (finger) input.

Compact and Chunky

At 9.2 by 11.7 by 1.5 inches, the LifeBook T4410 is a tidy, slightly thick slab that fits comfortably, if somewhat heavily -- 4.5 pounds -- into the crook of an arm. The system has a nicely solid feel to it, with touches such as a shock-mounted hard drive, spill-resistant keyboard, and a snap-close latch that secures the lid (although the latch took a little fiddling in face-up or tablet mode).

Headphone and microphone jacks, a FireWire port, an SD/Memory Stick flash-card slot, and a recess to hold the five-inch stylus are on the Fujitsu's front edge. A USB 2.0 port and an ExpressCard/54 slot are at left, with VGA, HDMI, Ethernet, and two more USB ports at the rear. DisplayPort, eSATA, and mobile broadband are absent, though you can buy a USB or ExpressCard 3G solution for the last. Both Bluetooth and 802.11g/n wireless are standard.

A modular bay on the system's right side holds either the standard DVD±RW drive or an optional ($149) second battery pack. With just the one battery pack, our real-world work sessions averaged three hours and 45 minutes, plus or minus some hard-disk thrashing and DVD viewing.

The Fujitsu boasts a full-sized, slightly noisy or clickety keyboard with a comfortable typing feel. The layout is familiar and welcoming except for the Pause/Break key usurping the Delete key's proper place in the top right corner; PgUp and PgDn double as Home and End keys when combined with a Fn key.

The touchpad is a bit smaller or shorter than we'd like (1.5 by 2.6 inches), but works smoothly; its buttons offer a good tactile feel. Secure logon seekers will appreciate the fingerprint sensor built into the screen bezel.

Plenty of Power

One reason for our test configuration's near-two-grand price was its stepped-up Intel CPU -- the Core 2 Duo P8700, a 2.53GHz dual-core with 3MB of Level 2 cache. Even limited to 2GB of DDR3 memory (we'd expect 4GB in this price range), the potent processor made the T4100 a multitasking workhorse, running and switching among our productivity applications -- there's the usual trial edition of Microsoft Office 2007, including OneNote for Tablet PC jotters -- and the Touch Pack gadgets without pause.

The LifeBook rendered Cinebench R10's sample scene in a near-desktop-class two minutes and 51 seconds, though its tepid Intel GMA 4500MHD integrated graphics kept it to an underwhelming score of 842 in 3DMark06. The 250GB, 5,400-rpm Fujitsu hard disk posted middling performance numbers.

If we were spending our own money, we'd save a few hundred bucks by picking Fujitsu's $1,649 configuration -- which comes with a smaller 160GB hard drive but has the dual-digitizer, extra-bright display plus a three- instead of one-year warranty -- and invest the savings in the modular-bay battery to bring the tablet closer to a full day's unplugged use. But in whichever configuration, the T4410 is the most appealing example of multitouch technology we've tested. It makes us look forward to a repertoire that goes beyond touchpad gestures.